The Golf Cart Ordinance and the Airport: The Fine Print of Life on Davis Islands

Most people who live on Davis Islands can tell you two things about their neighborhood without thinking: you can drive a golf cart on the street here, and there's an airport at the south end of the island where you can watch small planes land. Both are true. Neither is quite as simple as it sounds, and the two facts are more connected than most residents realize.

The golf cart privilege comes from a single piece of city code that applies nowhere else in Tampa. The airport is a working general aviation field that has sat quietly at the end of Severn Avenue since the Depression era, doing the same job it has always done. What's changed recently is that Tampa International Airport has started talking publicly about connecting the two islands of infrastructure, the runway system downtown and the little strip on Davis Islands, with electric air taxis. That conversation is barely a few months old. It's worth understanding both halves of the system before it moves any further.

The ordinance everyone knows about, mostly

Ask a longtime resident why golf carts are allowed here and you'll get some version of "because it's Davis Islands." The more precise answer is Tampa City Ordinance No. 2017-161, codified as Section 14-55 of the city code, which authorizes golf cart operation on the public roads of Davis Islands and nowhere else in the city. Drive a cart down a street in Hyde Park or Palma Ceia and it's not a gray area. It's illegal unless the vehicle is registered, titled, and insured as a low-speed vehicle.

On Davis Islands, the exemption exists because of the island's layout and its low speed limits, and it has made the neighborhood something of a model for other Florida golf cart communities. But the ordinance carries real conditions that get overlooked by people who assume the whole island is a free-for-all:

• Carts can only operate from sunrise to sunset unless they're equipped with headlights and taillights for nighttime use
• Roads must be posted at 25 mph or less
• Every cart needs functional brakes, working steering, tires in usable condition, rear reflectors, a white front light, and a red rear light
• Drivers need a valid driver's license, and Florida law sets 16 as the minimum age for anyone operating a cart on public roads

That last point catches people off guard more than any other. A golf cart is not a toy a 14-year-old can take around the block once school lets out, even on an island built around them. And the equipment requirements mean that a cart that's fine for puttering around a private driveway is not automatically street legal the moment it rolls onto Adalia or Chippewa.

None of this is a technicality worth losing sleep over. It's the reason the island can support 200-plus decorated carts rolling through the streets every December for the Davis Islands Golf Cart Parade, an event the city itself lists on its calendar, starting at the Seaplane Basin and ending at DI Electric Vehicles. The ordinance is generous. It's just not unconditional, and knowing where the line actually sits is part of knowing the island.

The airport at the end of the road

Keep driving south past the dog beach and the ordinance gives way to the other institution that shapes daily life here: Peter O. Knight Airport, still operating on the same site it has occupied since 1935. It was built as a Works Progress Administration project and served as Tampa's main airport until 1946, when the city's commercial traffic moved to what's now Tampa International. Peter O. Knight never stopped working. It's still a general aviation field, run today by Atlas Aviation, with a mix of private pilots, flight students, and small business aircraft using its runway on a given afternoon.

For residents, the airport doubles as scenery. Seaplane Basin Park sits right next to it, and the combination of open water, a working seaplane basin, and a runway with regular traffic makes it one of the more distinctive backdrops for an evening walk in Tampa. It's also functional in ways that show up on the calendar. Islands Fest, an event that's been running since 2006, is held at the Seaplane Basin and airport property every April, with aircraft on display alongside car clubs and local sponsors. And when Tampa's Gasparilla Pirate Fest sends its flotilla up the channel every January, the ships pass directly alongside the airport, which makes the seawall along the runway one of the better places on the island to watch the boats go by.

What's new is the flight path, not the field

Here's the part that hasn't made its way into most conversations about the island yet. In April 2026, Tampa International Airport's CEO, Michael Stephens, told the Pinellas County Commission that the airport is working with state, federal, and industry partners to bring electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or eVTOL air taxis, into the region's transportation network. Early plans specifically include a connection between Tampa International and Peter O. Knight Airport on Davis Islands.

"We are looking to be the epicenter of flying cars," Stephens said, framing the Tampa-Orlando corridor as an early test market for the technology.

That's a striking sentence to attach to a small municipal airfield most residents think of as a place to watch planes and not much else. The plan is still early stage. There's no timeline for actual air taxi flights, and the announcement was about regional planning rather than construction underway on Davis Islands itself. But it reframes what the airport is. For eighty years, Peter O. Knight has been a quiet piece of aviation infrastructure that happened to sit inside a residential neighborhood. If Tampa's air taxi plans move forward, it becomes something else: one end of a commuter route between the island and downtown, in the same way the Columbia Drive Bridge already is.

Residents who've spent years treating the runway as scenery are the ones who should be paying attention now, not because anything is changing this year, but because this is usually how these things start. A regional planning conversation becomes a funding conversation, which becomes an infrastructure conversation, and the airport that's been static since the 1940s starts moving again.

Two systems, one calendar

What ties the golf cart ordinance and the airport together isn't just geography. Together they set the rhythm of the island's public year in a way few Tampa neighborhoods can claim:

• January: the Gasparilla flotilla passes the airport, and residents line the seawall to watch
• April: Islands Fest brings aircraft and community vendors to the Seaplane Basin
• December: the Golf Cart Parade rolls from the Seaplane Basin through the island's streets

Both institutions run on rules that were written for a different era and have simply kept working. The 2017 ordinance formalized something residents were already doing informally. The airport has been sitting at the end of the island since before most of the current housing stock existed. What makes this moment worth noticing is that one of those two systems, the one that's been static the longest, is now part of a conversation about the region's future transportation network. The golf carts aren't going anywhere. The airport might be about to matter in a way it hasn't since Eastern and National Airlines flew out of it in the 1940s.

If you're weighing what it actually means to live somewhere that runs on rules like these, day to day and season to season, that's the kind of local read Heidi Odio can walk you through, along with what it means for the value and character of a home on the island itself.