The city of St. Petersburg wants to hear your thoughts on I-175.
Residents — and almost anyone who's ever been to a Rays game at Tropicana Field — are likely familiar with the stretch of the interstate that runs through downtown, spanning from I-275 to the west through 4th Street South to the east.
In January, the Florida Department of Transportation launched a long-term study on how I-175 affects the community around it.
To that end, they're conducting open houses and asking for community input to figure out the best course of action.
At their first open house, held at the USF St. Petersburg campus on Monday, dozens of people showed up to mark maps with suggestions and share their thoughts with transportation leaders.
USF environmental science and policy senior Audrey Everett said that this specific part of I-175 isn’t used enough to justify its negative effects on the rest of the city.
“I feel very disconnected from where the highway starts, that whole area feels very hostile to pedestrians,” Everett, who supports building bike and pedestrian-friendly cities, said.
“You also catch the feeling when you’re by Tropicana Field that you’re completely separated from south St. Pete.”
She hopes to see this section of I-175 become a boulevard with accessible, well-connected public transit, separated bike lanes, and some affordable housing.
Everett currently works with the USF Center for Urban Transportation Research and has worked with FDOT on crash analysis studies. Through that work, she’s learned about commuter safety and the importance of roadways that don’t endanger residents.
“Just last week, we had somebody taken in off of MLK South and brought to (Orlando Health Bayfront Hospital). They died from their injuries there,” said Campbell Park resident and nurse anesthesiologist Justin Cournoyer. “And so as a nurse, I see the public health impacts and the dangers that this road brings to my neighborhood.”
Cournoyer is the co-founder of Reimagine I-175, an advocacy group that formed after the 2022 Downtown Mobility Study in St. Petersburg found that there was a possibility for the highway to be torn down and rebuilt as a boulevard.
With the downtown stretch of I-175 removed, he imagines commuters exiting I-275 onto 5th Avenue South and entering a boulevard.
“It would be two or three lanes in each direction, it would have a median with trees on it,” Cournoyer said. “It could possibly have a bus rapid transit line down one side, or a dedicated ambulance road which would be vital for our EMS to be able to get to the hospitals [nearby].”
Both Cournoyer and Everett feel that reconnecting the city with a boulevard is essential to repairing the damages done to the Gas Plant District community when I-175 was built.
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“Especially with Tropicana Field…it was our historic Black community that was completely destroyed for basically a giant parking lot, which sits empty for most of the year,” Everett said.
“We know [building I-175 this way] was intentional, it’s still a big barrier, and it’s divisive,” Cournoyer added. “There’s literally no way across except for this little footbridge that brings you to nowhere, essentially.”
While he thinks that removing this section of the highway from downtown won’t significantly add to drivers' commute time, others felt differently.
Many visitors to the open house left post-it notes saying that I-175 helped cut down on travel time and was too convenient to be taken away.
“Keep traffic off of residential streets! Keep highway! This intersection is already busy,” one note read.
Transportation Planning Manager Brian Hunter said the fact that the land near the highway has multiple uses can make it challenging to address everyone’s needs.
“You have educational locations like USF St. Pete. We also have a couple of St. Petersburg College campuses on both sides of the corridor,” he said. “We have schools, there's two hospitals, there's a lot of businesses and residents all within a pretty tight corridor.”
Hunter said that FDOT will host multiple community input workshops in the coming months, but none have been announced yet.
The project is still in the planning phase, the first of four phases. It’s expected to be complete in April 2026.
You can share your thoughts with FDOT at their upcoming community events or online.
