About Tampa Rail

The best way to open this page is by talking about what Tampa Rail once was.

Incarnations of Tampa Rail going back to 1998.

Prior to the present, Tampa Rail was an exhibition site for the development of urban transportation rail solutions in Tampa Florida. It editorialized on and disseminated information from an advocacy standpoint the progress of various light and high speed rail projects impacting the region. In its long history there were several such attempts to develop urban rail, most which never gained traction or were shot down if they did. The one exception to date is the Teco Line Streetcar System which began operation in 2002 and continues to this day.

In September 2008 I, as the sole editor and publisher, moved to New York City, effectively stunting any real ability to continue collecting raw local content and to provide a meaningful presentation on the subject at a local level. In the transition plan I outlined in this post, I anticipated this and talked about how I would try to take advantage of the zero-presence limitation by increasing the blog's scope to a national level, making Tampa's struggle to improve livability and to restore population density around an urban core a centerpiece that other cities might relate to. This is where it picks up today.

Me standing outside demo BRT
bus in August 2007

The transition to its broader role is new and will require practice. Typing this up now I have no real idea how the model I just described will actually play out on your screen.

Meanwhile, filling the local void in wake of Tampa Rail's departure, actual social media experts friendly to the rail and urban development cause have sprung up and done so quite effectively. Nothing Tampa Rail could do can compete with the organization, budgets, insights, and access to the process of building out and selling rail than the new generation of websites and blogs dedicated to doing so.

The Tampa Rail you are looking at now should be talking about not just the variety and progress of fixed guideway development projects around the country, but also the tension between the progressive majority and the tax-obsessed fringe that interfere with the plight of democracy to improve city life and the quality of the human condition existing within them. Watching rail projects rise and fall at the behest of conservative influences in Tampa for so long has left me sensitive to their potency, tactics, and their destructive intent to shape and script what matters in our society, so I'm opt to gripe about and call them out any chance that I get.

Tampa Rail runs using a custom blogging application called Battle Blog that I myself wrote and continue to update and make available to others.