TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 A Tampa dad says he no longer feels safe driving on West Shore Boulevard, especially now that he\u2019s teaching his kids to drive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Edgar Ramirez-Pagan said he hardly recognizes West Shore Boulevard anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a neighborhood street. It\u2019s become much more of a throughway due to that development north and south,\u201d Ramirez-Pagan said.<\/p>\n
He has lived just off the road for 20 years, and he said it\u2019s now harder than ever just to make a turn onto the road.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all go to work. We all go to school. There are times where it makes a left-hand turn onto any part of Westshore almost deadly. Dangerous,\u201d Ramirez-Pagan said.<\/p>\n
As the traffic has gotten busier, he finds that drivers have to take more chances just to get where they have to go.<\/p>\n
He finds that especially to be the case on West Shore Boulevard between Kennedy Boulevard and Gandy Boulevard, where the road is only two lanes.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou pray for the goodwill of somebody to let you in. And if not, you kind of manhandle your way into traffic. That irritates people and you get yelled at, but I don\u2019t know how else to do it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Officials with both Hillsborough County and the city of Tampa said there are no immediate fixes in the works on West Shore.<\/p>\n
However, FDOT said the ongoing improvements to the Westshore Interchange should help traffic on surrounding roads, like West Shore Boulevard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now that he\u2019s teaching his teenage kids to drive, Ramirez-Pagan hopes something can be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cTeaching a 15-16-year-old how to make a pretty precarious left-handed turn on Westshore \u2014 it really keeps me up at night,\u201d Ramirez-Pagan said.<\/p>\n
Note from Tim: When referring to West Shore Boulevard, the city of Tampa uses two words. When referring to the Westshore area, it\u2019s one word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TAMPA, Fla. \u2014 A Tampa dad says he no longer feels safe driving on West Shore Boulevard, especially…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[274,2173,2178,276,2179,115,135,137,136,7227,278,729,2177,835],"class_list":["post-330840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tampa","tag-app-top-stories","tag-app-traffic-transit","tag-app-traffic-inbox","tag-hillsborough-county","tag-inbox","tag-news","tag-tampa","tag-tampa-headlines","tag-tampa-news","tag-tim-wronka","tag-top-stories","tag-traffic","tag-traffic-and-transit","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}