A stretch of busy State Road (SR) A1A that cuts through the City of Cape Canaveral is preparing to get a makeover to help improve safety.

Before then, the city council will work through a pair of options before presenting the desired option to the Florida Department of Transportation. The discussion is one of two items that will take place during the Nov. 1 city council meeting. 

“We do really need all parts of our community to weigh in on this,” said Lexi Miller, the resilience engineering services manager in Cape Canaveral.

“It does affect not only the aesthetics of Cape Canaveral, how people commute through it, how people get from point A to point B, how they come home, how they go to work, how they do their errands, how they enjoy the walkability and multi-modalism of the city. It kind of is all part of this.”

During the city council meeting, the council will technically be looking at four options for A1A between the intersection of North Atlantic Avenue and George King Boulevard. 

The original concept for the project at the intersection of North Atlantic Avenue and A1A was to reconfigure that point as a roundabout. That would be paired with a new alignment for International Drive to run straight across from North Atlantic Avenue, instead of being south on A1A.

That was met with considerable backlash from the public. That’s why during the Aug. 16 city council meeting, the council approved a resolution that created an official point of opposition to the roundabout. 

“FDOT has been fantastic to work with us and to get down to really the options, as curbs and gutters go, based on a signalized intersection,” said Cape Canaveral Mayor Wes Morrison. “And so, I think these two options here that we’re looking at really come down to having the citizens weigh in between alternative one and two.”

Morrison and Cape Canaveral City Manager Todd Morley met with Jack Adkins, the FDOT District 5 director of transportation development on Sept. 1 to discuss their options after residents rejected the idea of a roundabout.

They came back with a couple of options that were briefly discussed at the Sept. 21 meeting.

Alternative one is defined by two key features. It has a 5-foot separated lane for cyclists and a 5-foot sidewalk for pedestrians. It would also only have a physical median surrounding a pedestrian crosswalk. 

The second option would have no separation between walkers and bicyclists. However, it would create a continuous median that would be 15.5-feet-wide.

The main goal for these changes is to improve safety conditions along this stretch of A1A in Cape Canaveral. A 2018 community survey found that 79% of residents don’t feel safe walking or biking on A1A. 

During the Oct. 18 city council meeting, council members approved the adoption of the Space Coast Transportation Planning Organizations (TPO) Vision Zero plan. It has the aspiration of improving roadway conditions to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to none.

“Along A1A, there’s been various pockets that are a little bit more dangerous than others. Anecdotally, we always here that walking across A1A or biking across A1A is really not an appealing way to move about our community and move around it up and down beachside,” Miller said.

“This project really proposes to drop our speed a little bit, put in some traffic calming measures. We have two alternatives for what our roadway could look like when it comes to realigning a signalized intersection here in the heart of Cape Canaveral.” 

Once a general design is chosen, and full engineering work is done, construction on the project is likely to start around 2026. For a more detailed look at the two options under consideration, click here.

The Cape Canaveral City Council will meet to discuss these during the Nov. 1 meeting. The public is invited to participate in the process and offer their opinions.