Highland Beach's A1A Project Was "Done." The Path Beside It Wasn't.

"For most people in town, the project is done."

That's Town Manager Marshall Labadie, describing the state of Ocean Boulevard back in January, after more than a year and a half of construction on the $8.3 million project to widen, repave, and add bike lanes to the 3.3 miles of A1A running through Highland Beach. The barrels had come down. The bike lane markings were fresh and green. By any measure that matters to a driver, the corridor was finished.

It wasn't finished for anyone on foot.

What "Substantially Complete" Actually Meant

The FDOT resurfacing project that ran through Highland Beach starting in 2024 did what it set out to do on the roadway itself: milling and repaving the travel lanes, widening the shoulders into five-foot bike lanes on each side, regrading the drainage swales, and refreshing the signage and pavement markings. When Labadie declared the contract substantially complete in January, he was talking about that scope. The punch list left over was supposed to be cosmetic. Touch-ups. A sprinkler head here, an unlevel pathway seam there.

One of those loose ends turned out to be bigger than a punch list item. The regrading work that fixed drainage on the roadway changed the elevation of the adjacent shared-use path, the same path pedestrians and cyclists use to move along the barrier island. According to the town's own funding request to the Florida legislature, those elevation and drainage changes have caused flooding on the path and, in places, forced pedestrians into the travel lanes to get around standing water.

A second loose end shows up off to the side of the story but tells the same joke. At the A1A and Linton Boulevard intersection, the electrical loop that detects vehicles and triggers the signal to change was removed during the stormwater work and never rebuilt. Labadie noted the resulting mistimed signals were causing backups, especially with the seasonal traffic increase. That fix is still pending separately.

Two Contracts, One Corridor

So there are now, in effect, two A1A projects layered on top of each other: the one the town just finished, and the one it opened to correct a side effect of the first.

The state grant paying for the second project exists specifically because the first one left a documented pedestrian safety gap. That's not a criticism of either project on its own. It's a reminder that "complete" on a corridor this size rarely means complete for every mode of travel that uses it at the same time.

Where the Eight Lights Are Going

The new work targets eight mid-block crosswalks identified through a Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization road safety audit of the corridor. If you walk or bike A1A regularly, these are the crossings that will change, listed by the building each one sits near and its milepost along the road:

• Grand Court, milepost 5.017
• Near Regency Highland, milepost 5.89
• Near Toscana Towers, milepost 6.15
• At the Highland Beach Club, milepost 6.293
• At the Coronado Ocean Club, milepost 6.507
• Near the Ambassadors East, milepost 6.577
• Near the Monterey House, milepost 6.817
• Near Delray Sands Resort, milepost 7.137

That last one is worth noting for anyone who dines at Latitudes, the oceanfront restaurant inside Delray Sands Resort. The crossing nearest one of the only sit-down restaurant options actually inside town limits is on the list.

How the Lights Actually Work

The town commission approved a $283,920 agreement with Lux Solar Inc. to furnish and install in-road light systems at all eight locations. According to the contract, Lux Solar is the same company that installed the existing lighting infrastructure at these crossings, which likely explains why the town turned back to them for the upgrade rather than opening the work to a new vendor.

The new fixtures are bi-directional flashing yellow lights, embedded directly into the roadway surface in composite housings and connected by flexible conduit. They'll activate from the same pedestrian push buttons already installed at some of these intersections, the ones that currently trigger the overhead sign-posted lights. So the mechanism residents already use to cross won't change. What changes is that drivers approaching a crossing will now see lights flashing from the pavement itself, not just from a sign overhead, at the exact moment someone has pressed the button to cross.

The broader project bundled into this contract also covers milling, repaving, and regrading the sections of shared-use path that have been holding water, which is the underlying fix for the flooding problem that started this whole second round of work.

The Timeline No One Can Give You Yet

Here's the honest part. Per the town's own reporting, the project must be completed within six months of the date Highland Beach issues Lux Solar a formal notice to proceed. As of the most recent update, that notice hadn't gone out yet, so there's no firm installation date on the calendar. If you're timing a walk to avoid construction, or wondering whether the crossing near your building will be dug up before season winds down, the honest answer is that the town doesn't have a date to give you either. What exists right now is an approved contract and a six-month clock that hasn't started ticking.

That's a fairly normal state for a municipal infrastructure project to be in, and it's worth knowing that "approved" and "scheduled" are two different things here. The state appropriation is secured. The vendor is under contract. The actual dig-up-the-pavement work is still waiting on a notice to proceed that the town controls the timing of.

What This Means If You Use A1A Every Day

The practical takeaway for anyone who lives along this stretch of Ocean Boulevard is that the corridor is mid-story, not post-story. The repaving that made headlines in January solved the roadway problem it was built to solve. The path beside it is getting its own separate, smaller, more targeted fix, funded through a different mechanism, on a different timeline, by a different contractor. If a walk along A1A near the Coronado Ocean Club or the Monterey House feels a little different in the coming months, that's this project, not a new one.

It's also a useful reminder that in a town built around three miles of coastline and one road, an update to that road touches nearly everyone eventually. This is what "living here" actually looks like: not a headline about a project closing out, but the slower, more specific work of fixing what the last headline missed.

For residents who want the wider context on where else construction is active along Ocean Boulevard, or how a change like this affects a home near the corridor, the team at Tinka Ellington Group tracks these details as part of knowing this stretch of coastline the way a neighbor would. If you'd like to talk through what's happening on your block, Request a Private Consultation and we'll walk through it together.