Tampa Makes MOVES to Become a Smart City

Tampa MOVES is a comprehensive mobility plan designed for Tampa, Florida, aimed at transforming the city's transportation landscape over the next 30 years.

Tampa MOVES focuses on enhancing mobility, opportunity, vision, EQUITY, and safety (M.O.V.E.S). The plan emphasizes creating a more connected, accessible, and safer urban environment by improving transportation options and infrastructure. The plan includes significant investments in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, aiming to make walking and biking not only easier but also safer and more comfortable. This includes constructing new bike lanes, protected bike lanes, and pedestrian pathways. The plan estimates a need for about $2 billion to fully implement all recommended projects over the next three decades, indicating the scale of investment required for Tampa's transportation vision. Public perception of MOVES has been mostly negative, with a mix of support for sustainable urban development and skepticism about the implications of such plans, like fears over privacy or loss of traditional mobility freedoms. Discussions also occasionally link Tampa MOVES with urban trends like the "15-minute city" concept.

The city has already started implementing quick-build projects, like the Main Street improvements, showcasing immediate actions towards safer pedestrian and bike environments.

Interestingly, the Tampa MOVES plan is almost identical to the City of Houston and Harris County’s VISION ZERO plan. If you read Tampa’s Vision Zero plan, it is almost IDENTICAL to Harris County. It is curious as to why all these progressive run counties and cities are all running the same 2030 operations in which they never disclosed to their constituents when they campaigned for office.

What’s not being discussed regarding these VISION ZERO programs, they also adopt carbon emission reductions. How does a city gauge carbon emission? Through license plate cameras, currently in Houston, the city and county have installed license plate cameras everywhere citing they are needed to combat the “uptick in crime” which was caused by the City and County adopting bail reform, defunding the police, as well as defunding the district attorney’s office. The vision zero concept is almost identical to Britain’s ULEZ program. The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in Britain, specifically in London, which is an initiative aimed at improving air quality by using license plate cameras to charge drivers of vehicles that do not meet certain emission standards Non-compliant vehicles entering the ULEZ incur a daily charge. For cars, motorcycles, vans, and specialist heavy vehicles up to 3.5 tonnes, this charge is £12.50 daily. Larger vehicles over 3.5 tonnes are subject to the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) charges instead, not ULEZ, unless they meet the ULEZ standards.

With Hurricane Milton's approach, there's been mention of Tampa MOVES in the context of emergency evacuations, highlighting how urban planning for mobility could impact or be impacted by natural disasters, though this seems more speculative or tangential to the core infrastructure improvements.

Below you can see all the Vision Zero Communities. Surprisingly, many of these communities seem to be in the state of Florida where Milton is about to make landfall.