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Tired of the commute to work? Then you may want to be aware of the new centralized location of Hillsborough Area Regional Transit's (HART) bus route, coming soon to the FishHawk Sports Complex as the already established Park-N-Ride moves from its current home at FishHawk Fellowship Church.
Now under construction, the Park-N-Ride will be situated off FishHawk Blvd. directly southeast of the four baseball fields that will be housed in the complex.
"We feel as though it is the perfect partnership," states John Brill, spokesman for Hillsborough County Parks, Recreation and Conservation. "It gets cars off the road, helping with traffic and pollution and saves residents money on gas."
Containing 95 parking places and four ADA spaces, the parking lot will be shared with the FishHawk Sports Complex enabling commuters to park in the facility until later in the day, where then the lot will be available to residents for sporting events in the evenings and on weekends.
HART plans to pick up the expense for the construction of the parking lot and has a total budget of $278,600. According to Lynda Mifsud, construction/contracts manager for HART, "With the increase of residential housing, most recently the Lake Hutto development, we only expect demand for express commuter service to increase. In fact, the county required the developer (which is now Newland Communities) to contribute to the construction cost of the Park-N-Ride in meeting their transit concurrency for their development. They have provided $100,000 of the total $278,600 budget."
The current lot at the church has only 25 spaces for the Park-N-Ride and charges $1,000 a month, and with the growing numbers of residents using mass transit, more space is needed.
The bus route will take the place of bus route 24X, continuing the commute from FishHawk and Riverview to MacDill Air Force Base and bus route 27X, running from Brandon to Tampa. With plans to open in June 2008, the Park-N-Ride lot is under agreement between HART and Hillsborough County to be in operation for the next 10 years, with two renewals of five years each afterwards.
Brill concludes saying, "It is a mutual benefit to us both as well as the community."
For more information, call 903-2241.
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