After a decade of building Tampa’s Green Spine urban bicycle track section-by-section, the city is closing in on the final stretch of construction.
An extension through Ybor City has been under construction since January and is scheduled to finish in the fall. Following that, work moves to the opposite end of the Green Spine for the final section, an extension along Cass Street from Howard Avenue in North Hyde Park to the cycle track’s current stopping point at Rome Avenue. The city has that project out to bid, with a May 13th deadline to receive responses from contractors. Construction is expected to finish in mid-2026, completing a 3.4-mile cycle track through Tampa’s urban core connecting North Hyde Park, downtown, the Riverwalk, and Ybor.
“By the time it’s done, it will have been a good 14 years in the making, a good decade and a half to fully unfold,” Tampa’s Director of Transportation Services Brandon Campbell says. “That’s not a big surprise for this sort of visionary project to take that long to unfold. It’s been interesting to watch the trajectory of the project and the associated nearby growth of the city along its path.”
A transportation option during rapid growth
The concept of the Green Spine, a two-way cycle track protected from vehicle traffic by three-foot raised separators, dates back to the city’s 2012 InVision Tampa City Center Plan. That document aimed to improve pedestrian and bicycle facilities and better connect neighborhoods in the downtown area to accommodate projected population growth in the city’s urban core.
That projected growth occurred, and then some. Before tailing off significantly in 2024, Tampa ranked among the top three cities nationally in recent years for net in-migration — the difference between the number of people moving here and the number moving away. Redevelopment has transformed downtown, the Channel District, Water Street Tampa, and West River. Now, it’s reshaping areas of North Hyde Park and Ybor.
In North Hyde Park, developer Asana Partners’ mixed-use project Rome Collective is under construction on Rome Avenue a few blocks south of Cass and the Green Spine. Along Nuccio Parkway in Ybor, the 50-acre mixed-use Gasworx district is taking shape. In late 2024, Gasworx, a partnership between national developer KETTLER and Ybor developer Darryl Shaw, opened its first residential building, the luxury apartment community La Unión Residence and Social Hall. Right now, multiple buildings and a mix of residential, office, retail, and restaurant space are under construction. The ambitious project along the Green Spine corridor is just a stone’s throw south of the intersection of Nuccio and Seventh Avenue, the starting point for the Ybor extension project.
The extension is split into two phases. The first phase continues the separated cycle track up Nuccio, east to 15th Street, and up 15th to 17th Avenue. From 17th Avenue to 21st Avenue, the second phase runs a 14-foot-wide shared-use sidewalk along Cuscaden Park. The two phases of the project cost a combined $4.44 million, with two federally funded Florida Department of Transportation Local Agency Program grants covering most of that.
Making an impact
In 2016, the first phase of the Green Spine opened along Cass downtown from the Cass Street Bridge to Nebraska Avenue. As the cycle track expanded over the years, biking to work became a realistic option for people looking to get some workday exercise or looking to avoid congestion and paying to park. It’s a safe biking route through the urban core of the largest city in a region routinely ranking among the worst in the country for pedestrian and bicyclist deaths. And the Green Spine is the model for the quick-build projects Tampa has launched in recent years. In fact, those quick-builds, -low-cost transportation projects with short construction times and safety and accessibility improvements for pedestrians, bicycles, e-bikes, and scooters - started with the Green Spine extension across the Cass Street Bridge.
Shifting gears
With the Green Spine nearing completion, Tampa's transportation staff is shifting gears to focus on what’s next for the city’s bicycle route network.
“Generally, at this point, we are moving to a phase where we are doing connectors between these long-planned larger corridor projects,” Campbell says. “Now we’re finding ways to make better connections and tie everything together. We’re looking for ways to enable commutes and leisure trips on bicycles between major centers in the city and make better connections into the neighborhoods from those corridors we have been working on for very long.”
The city’s upcoming West Riverwalk expansion project will turn Rome Avenue in West Tampa into a key north-south bike route that connects with the east-west Green Spine at Cass Street. “Complete street” improvements to Rome such as on-street bike facilities, enhanced crosswalks, and pedestrian walkways are intended to make the road a safe, convenient, and well-used bike and pedestrian route.
There’s also some interest in filling gaps and improving connections between various trails and routes to assemble a regional bike route between Tampa and Pinellas County. Cyclists could cross Tampa Bay via the shared-use path on the Courtney Campbell Causeway or the path opening next year on the Howard Frankland Bridge’s new span.
Westshore Alliance Executive Director Michael Maurino would like to see the regional route idea become reality. He says Gray Street, an east-west road running from West Tampa, through the Westshore District, before ending at the WestShore Plaza property, is ideally suited to be the crucial middle link connecting this regional bike network. The road is already part of Tampa’s low-stress bike route network with street signs and sharrows reminding drivers to share the road with cyclists. Gray is also a direct route to Rome Avenue, which will get bicycle and pedestrian enhancements as part of the city’s West Riverwalk expansion and become a key north-south connector.
Maurino says the Alliance, a business-based nonprofit in the Westshore District, envisions Gray Street as the “River to Bay Greenway” and is working with city officials to try and make that vision a reality.
“That’s a great east-west route and we think it can eventually be the middle piece of a tremendous regional bike and pedestrian route,” Maurino says.
For more information, go to Green Spine Cycle Track