Plans for flyover from Midpoint Bridge to ease traffic

Cape Coral drivers, you spend a lot of time in this traffic on your way to and from work.

Lee County is working on easing that troublesome traffic with a flyover connecting the Midpoint Bridge to Summerlin Road.

It could reduce traffic, but many businesses are worried their shops would get skipped over.

Well, they definitely can agree that something needs to be done to address the traffic madness around here, especially at rush hour, but some of them depend on the extra traffic to get people into their shops, and they’re a little nervous about how this could affect them.

If there’s one thing people in Southwest Florida can bond over, it’s hating the traffic on the Midpoint Bridge and Colonial Boulevard.

“Something has to get done on colonial that’s just terrible over here,” said Frank Pilarski, co-owner of Philly Junction.

Lee County commissioners are trying to get something done. They want to add an additional travel lane in each direction of the Midpoint Bridge and build a left-turn flyover from Summerlin Road to westbound Colonial Boulevard.

The idea is that drivers could skip most of the chaos of those streets and have more room on the bridge, something Kenleigh Gislason, owner of Duckberry designs in the Colonial Crossings Plaza, said she supports.

“We definitely need to. I mean, the traffic is awful, and there are certain areas that you can’t do much to make it better, but that is an opportunity to make it better,” Gislason said.

But Pilarski has some concerns. He’s worried anything designed to lure people away from his business, which sits on the corner of Colonial and Summerlin where the flyover would be could be bad for it.

“If they decided to go with a different route and reroute them over to Summerlin and bypass the entire complex, that’s gonna affect all the businesses here,” Pilarski said.

But as long as it doesn’t affect his business, he’s in full agreement that a traffic solution is necessary.

“I’m hoping, though, they’ll come up with a smart way to redirect traffic. It needs to be done,” Pilarski said.

Lee County says this project is still in the design phase, so there’s no way to know what it would look like or if it would affect businesses in the area, but the county said there will be a project development and environmental study that will analyze things like economic impacts, which will determine the design or even eliminate the project altogether.