- March 27, 2024
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To paraphrase a line from Paul Newman's indelible performance as charismatic outlaw Butch Cassidy, Tom Hall is a man with vision in a world full of folks wearing bifocals.
Four years ago, the Tampa businessman and civic leader outlined six ideas that would make Tampa a better place to live and do business. One of the ideas — locating the University of South Florida's Morsani School of Medicine in downtown Tampa — is about to come true.
Hall was at it again recently, offering four big ideas to an audience of local leaders and businesspeople during an Oct. 10 luncheon at the University Club in downtown Tampa.
Hall is the CEO of Hall Equity Corp., chairman of strategy and crisis management firm Tucker/Hall Inc. and founding vice chairman of the Tampa Downtown Partnership. His fingerprints are all over the city's downtown waterfront revival. He led the effort to build the Florida Aquarium in Tampa and even named the Channel District, Harbour Island and Channelside Drive.
“Great cities are the product of many ideas,” he says, adding that the city must fix its transportation woes, first and foremost. “If we don't solve transportation, none of the other ideas will matter.”
Hall's big idea for transportation is a monorail system — not light rail — that would, once and for all, he says, connect the Tampa Bay region's business and residential centers via mass transit. He lambasted the Florida Department of Transportation as “the Florida department of road-widening” and said the $6 billion pegged for the controversial Tampa Bay Express (TBX) project could pay for well more than 100 miles of monorail track instead of just one additional lane for the Howard Frankland Bridge.
“We will never catch up” with the amount of cars and trucks on the roads, Hall said. “You'll never get ahead of vehicle traffic.” He said it's time for local government to base transportation decisions on the needs of users, not vehicles, citing the highly regarded Tampa International Airport (TIA) as inspiration.
“It was one of the first airports in the world to be designed around the passenger, not the plane,” he said. “That's the last innovative thing we've done in transportation, and it was almost 50 years ago.”