Part of Crosstown Parkway will open several months early
November 27th, 2008 by Cara Fitzpatrick
PORT ST. LUCIE — City officials expect to reach another milestone in the construction of the Crosstown Parkway in March, opening a section of the massive road project several months early.
This segment of the road will run west from Florida’s Turnpike to Interstate 95, giving drivers another option to reach the highway from St. Lucie West.
Upon its completion, the Crosstown Parkway, estimated to cost $200 million, will be the city’s third east-west corridor, stretching from I-95 across sprawling Port St. Lucie to U.S. 1.
The parkway, six lanes wide and six miles long, should alleviate traffic woes on Prima Vista Boulevard to the north and Port St. Lucie Boulevard to the south.
The Crosstown Parkway will have no homes or businesses along either side and few traffic lights, ensuring quicker travel than on existing boulevards, city engineers have said.
The unanswered question, though, is where the parkway will cross the environmentally fragile St. Lucie River. Already, city officials have spent more than five years trying to get state and federal approval to bridge the river with no success. Several routes are under consideration, and officials have not given up yet.
If the permits come through, the bridge could be finished sooner than the initial projection of 2012, said City Engineer Walter England.
“We keep trying to shorten our time frame,” he said.
City officials opened the first completed segment - a $27 million bridge over the turnpike - a year ago, giving thousands of residents west of the river who must cross the turnpike a third option in addition to the two busy east-west boulevards.
The city council has agreed to allow construction seven days a week to speed progress on the section running from the turnpike to I-95 and reduce the amount of time in which homeowners must contend with the noise and inconvenience. That should get the road open about four to five months early, England said.
“We’re moving right along,” he said.
Tags: Crosstown Parkway
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November 28th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Having covered large construction projects for a large northwest Indiana daily, I still am bothered by the fact that we taxpayers were prompted to vote for Crosstown Exp. assessments WITHOUT clearly being told by our elected officials in their runup to this special elections that they in fact did not have all of their permitting in place before construction began. I never heard of beginning a project of this magnitude before getting the green light from local, state and federal permitting officials. How can this be? Dividing up the the project into sections has always been a problem for me. What’s really at stake here is the destruction of a part of primal Florida that never can be replaced, forever removed from us.
December 1st, 2008 at 8:17 am
Suzanne welcome to Port St Lucie, where its elected officials lie and deceive their consituients to get what they want. The City Coucnil led all the residents to beleive that the permits were in place for the completion of the bridge over the river. Once again it was brought to the forefront that these Elected Officials got this vote passed by lies an deception. Its unforuante that the city of port st lucie has a lame duck city council that is led around by the nose of its city manager Don Cooper.
Its unforuante that we as residents have Elected Officials that would rather manage “OUR” city by lies and deception too get what they want done. All this just get their name on some building in the future. What should we expect when you have a basket maker, a banker, a secretary, a fireman and a defunct businessman as your Elected Officials. They are so unprofessional that they are lead around and told what they will do by the city manager which also should be replaced. But if that is done then these offcials would be entirely clueless.
May 7th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
All I want to say is that Port Saint Lucie needs this bridge over the river to be able to compete with the rest of the South Florida cities, and really atract serious investors and businesses to the area in order to create the so desperately needed jobs, as well as for giving homeowners and the city the progress it was having before the housing market collapsed. I moved to PSL three years ago from Miami and I don’t regret it so far, although my house is worth about $120K less that what I purchased it for back then, I believe it is a nice city for young families to raise their children, and which has a lot of potential for becoming a really important city in Florida, while at the same time doing it environmentally responsible, and avoid repeating the same mistakes and flaws that the older South Florida cities did. I believe we can do it as long as we have responsible elected officials looking out for the real interests of its citizens.