July 16 marked the first day of heavy equipment and snarled traffic on A1A at the Delray/Highland Beach border. It clears out after 6 p.m. and on weekends. The project will cover all of Highland Beach. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
No sweat! Machines stand in for flag people
By Rich Pollack
As crews on the State Road A1A repaving project head south from Delray Beach, they’re bringing two bright orange devices that replace vest-clad workers spinning octagonal “stop” and “slow” paddles to guide cars through the construction zone.
Complete with large red and yellow traffic lights and a gate arm that drops down across the roadway, the mechanical flaggers are designed to keep traffic flowing smoothly with minimal human intervention and to prevent cars from crashing into one another when traffic is forced into a single lane.
Touted as being safer and more efficient than traditional flagmen, the solar-powered “automated flagger assistance devices” are an important piece of the $8.3 million Florida Department of Transportation’s road project, which is scheduled to continue for more than a year.
Solar-powered arms open on a timed schedule, directing traffic to one lane. Rich Pollack/The Coastal Star
That project, which began on July 10 and will stretch from just south of Linton Boulevard to the Highland Beach border with Boca Raton, includes road resurfacing, the creation of 5-foot bike lanes on either side of A1A and drainage improvements on the swales.
The coastal traffic nightmare is just beginning. Once work is completed on the 3.3-mile stretch, it will soon be followed by a resurfacing project on another portion of Delray Beach’s stretch of A1A and then a similar project on Boca Raton’s portion.
The current project will come with frustrating delays caused by lane closures during weekday hours.
Highland Beach Town Manager Marshall Labadie hopes the mechanical flaggers will ease some of that frustration while saving walkie-talkie flagmen (and flagwomen) from baking in the hot sun.
“In a sense they make for a more controlled traffic environment that drivers are accustomed to,” he said.
For much of the project, the devices will be in Highland Beach and will be the sole red-light signals in town, although this is not the first time they have been used there. Similar automated flaggers were used by FDOT contractors for a short time during a drainage improvement project in fall 2022.
Although the machines aim to keep cars moving, A1A traffic did come to a standstill on July 17 when crews accidentally ruptured a gas line, forcing a complete closure that was fixed within a few hours.
Labadie and FDOT leaders are urging motorists to plan for delays on A1A between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Labadie acknowledges the frustrations but believes the end result will be a significant improvement for motorists and better drainage along the road.
One area where the improvement will be most noticeable will be at the intersection of A1A and Linton.
Included in the new project is an almost quadrupling of the length of the left-turn lane for northbound cars heading west over the bridge, from 75 feet to 275 feet.
The current turn lane accommodates only about three cars. That will expand to about 11 vehicles once the work at the intersection is complete, meaning that fewer cars will be blocking traffic heading north through the intersection, FDOT representatives say.
Comments