After suffering for almost two years through construction woes at the intersection of State Road A1A and Beachland Boulevard, motorists traveling between the island and the Vero Beach mainland may have smoother sailing soon as they navigate that critical crossroads.

All the orange barrels blocking lanes or parts of lanes are finally scheduled to be picked up by Friday, Feb. 23, according to Melissa Simmons, assistant community outreach specialist for the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT), “pending weather and other unforeseen circumstances.” By that time, all new extended turn lanes should be open to traffic.

A contractor earlier this month started the last phase of the twin projects to make traffic flow better through the intersection in Vero’s Central Beach area. At an estimated cost of $5.6 million, the project wasn’t supposed to wind up until the spring of this year, so Simmons indicated construction was basically on schedule.

The major project involved lengthening the right-hand turn lane off southbound A1A onto Beachland for motorists heading to the mainland via the Merrill P. Barber bridge. The turn lane will soon stretch along an entire two-block section of A1A starting as far back as Banyan Road. This project took almost two years because it entailed coordinating the work of multiple subcontractors for rebuilding sidewalks, water runoff channels and culverts.

Once finished, with the addition of another 380 feet, the extended righthand turn lane will measure a total of 540 feet and can accommodate about triple the number of vehicles seeking to make the turn.

The other, much simpler project involved lengthening the left-hand turn lane off eastbound Beachland onto A1A North, which had also become far too short to accommodate all the traffic seeking to turn that way onto the island, especially during the busy winter season.

Both extended turn lanes are now provisionally covered by rough blacktop, but are not yet accessible to traffic while they await the final application of a new pavement layer to make the color and the level of the pavement uniform with the main roadways. FDOT said the new turn lanes are still closed to traffic for the moment because of a sharp drop-off at the edge of the pavement.

“The area has been closed with barrels to ensure the traveling public’s safety during construction,” Simmons said. “Safety is the department’s top priority and is embedded in everything we do.”

On other FDOT construction projects in District 4, which includes Vero Beach and is run out of headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, scheduled start and end dates have seen considerable slippage.

Traffic at A1A and Beachland, the gateway to the Barber bridge, has been heavier than normal this season because many motorists have been avoiding the 17th Street (Alma Lee Loy) bridge as traffic there is down to one lane in each direction due to a five-year rebuilding project.

No one seems to have been working at the A1A intersection with Beachland for the past week or so, which resulted in an almost comical incident on an extremely windy day. An orange construction barrel had blown over and was rolling around Beachland, presenting a new traffic hazard, when a uniformed policeman stopped, picked it up and returned it to its place.

But a few hours later, the same barrel had blown over again. This time, a good Samaritan stopped his car in the middle of the intersection, put on his flashers, picked up the barrel and wedged it between a tree and a hedge on the adjoining Premier Estate real estate office property.

The project has divided adjoining businesses and residents into antagonists and backers of the authorities in charge of the project. A receptionist at Premier Estate Properties office on the corner said the construction – and the time it has taken – has been “extremely frustrating” for the business, especially as contractors tore up some of the business’ paver stones at the entrance to the parking lot in front of the building.

But Bill Croke, a retired advertising executive from New York City who now splits his time between summers on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and winters at his home at the corner of Acacia Road and A1A, says he is basically happy with the way the construction was handled.

“Once I got their attention, they’ve been very thoughtful,” Croke said.

“I was pretty assertive and seeking out information and I always found someone to talk to,” said Croke. “A supervisor named Humberto was very helpful. When I got back to Vero Beach for the winter last December, I found a port-a-potty on my property, but when I made a call asking them to remove it, they did so right away.

“I had another concern that in rebuilding the sidewalk, they might remove some of the trees up against the fence of my property, so that I’d be staring right into the car windows of the motorists waiting to make the right turn,” Croke added. “But they said they’d be very careful so that wouldn’t happen – and they were.”

Croke does have one final concern that has not yet been addressed. As things stand now, motorists making the right turn off A1A onto Beachland will start seeing right-turn arrows as of the moment they get into the right lane after crossing Banyan Road.

“That’s confusing,” Croke says. “People might take that as an invitation, or even a command, to turn right on Acacia, which is my street, a whole block before they reach the Beachland intersection, to possibly avoid a red traffic light. That’s exactly what we’ve been trying to avoid – people in big cars from John’s Island and father north along A1A barreling down our residential streets at 80 miles per hour when our speed limit is 25.”

Croke says he has decided not to complain yet to the powers-that-be. He will wait until he sees the final traffic configuration after everything is done to see if he has to raise his voice again about that last-mile detail, but he is confident that the final version will be satisfactory to everyone.

“I’ll give them a chance before I beat up on them again,” Croke said. “I’m hopeful that the project will finally produce a positive result after all the suffering we’ve been through. We’re moving toward the finish line now.”