If you live along Ocean Boulevard, you already noticed the barrels disappeared sometime around the New Year. The pavement is smoother. The bike lanes are wider and marked in that bright reflective green you cannot miss. Town Manager Marshall Labadie told residents in January that the year-plus, $8.3 million FDOT resurfacing project was "substantially complete," with only punch-list items left, things like an unelevated pathway or a broken sprinkler.
That framing stuck. Most residents I talk to assume the A1A project is finished business, filed under things that used to be annoying and now aren't.
It isn't finished. The piece that was always the point, the part that actually protects someone stepping off the curb, is still eight crosswalks away from existing.
What January Actually Delivered
The scope of the completed work is real and worth naming precisely. Crews milled and resurfaced the roadway, widened it in both directions to add five-foot bicycle lanes, modified swales for drainage, and repainted signage and lane markings to current standards. Labadie was direct about what was still missing even as he called the project substantially done: the lighted, pedestrian-activated crosswalk signals that were part of the original vision were not part of what got finished. He said the town would look to the state legislature to fund them, and if that didn't happen, budget for them locally.
That's the gap between "the road is fixed" and "the road is safe to cross," and it's a gap that's been sitting open since January.
The Eight Corners Still Waiting
In August, the town commission approved a $375,000 state-funded project to close it. The design calls for in-ground LED lighting embedded at eight mid-block crosswalks, all identified through a Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization road safety audit of the corridor. The town's agreement with the installer, Lux Solar Inc., is priced at $283,920.
The eight locations are specific, and if you walk or bike this stretch you already pass most of them:
- Grand Court, milepost 5.017
- Near the 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 the Delray Sands Resort, milepost 7.137
These aren't generic midpoints picked off a map. They're the buildings where people actually step into the road, which is exactly why the safety audit flagged them.
The project's stated purpose runs deeper than lighting. Per the town's own funding request to the legislature, the work also includes milling, repaving, and regrading sections of the shared-use path beside A1A, specifically to fix elevation and drainage problems the resurfacing project itself created. Those changes had already caused flooding that pushed pedestrians off the path and into the travel lane in places. In other words, this second project exists partly to correct a side effect of the first one.
The Clock Hasn't Started
Here's the detail that changes how you should think about timing. The contract requires the work to be finished within six months of a formal notice to proceed, but as of the town's August announcement, the date of that notice had not been set or published. Six months from an undetermined start date means residents shouldn't assume these lights are a fall fixture. Realistically, this could stretch well into 2027 depending on when the notice actually gets issued.
While you wait, at least one existing crossing is already unreliable. The town's own homepage currently carries a notice that the crosswalk light signals at 3310 South Ocean Boulevard are out of service. That's not a hypothetical risk this project is designed to prevent. It's the exact failure mode happening right now, on the same corridor, while the replacement system is still in contract paperwork.
Where Turtle Season Complicates the Picture
Here's the part that hasn't shown up in the coverage of this project, and it's worth watching rather than ignoring. Highland Beach's own sea turtle program page states plainly that the town has more annual sea turtle nests than Boca Raton and Delray Beach. In the most recent full season with published counts, 2024, Highland Beach recorded 795 loggerhead nests, well ahead of Delray Beach's 292, along with 127 green turtle nests and 13 leatherback nests, according to reporting from The Coastal Star.
That volume is why the town's lighting ordinance is stricter than a courtesy request. Ordinance 554 requires all beachfront lighting turned off from dusk to dawn, every night, from March 1 through October 31, because visible light disorients nesting females and misdirects hatchlings away from the water. Nesting season is in effect right now and runs another eight weeks.
Two of the eight planned crosswalks sit directly in front of oceanfront buildings, the Highland Beach Club and the Coronado Ocean Club. The new fixtures are in-road embedded lights rather than beachfront fixtures, which is a meaningfully different design than the porch lights and pool lights the ordinance was written to police. Still, any project installing new illumination on this stretch during nesting season is one the town's Natural Resources Preservation Advisory Board will likely want to weigh in on before installation, and it's a detail worth watching if you live near either of those two corners.
The Signal Timing Nobody's Fixed Yet
One more piece of the resurfacing project's aftermath is still causing daily friction, and it has nothing to do with crosswalks. The traffic light at A1A and Linton Boulevard has been running on fixed timing instead of vehicle-triggered timing since the stormwater work required removing the roadway's electrical detection loop. Labadie confirmed in January that the loop still needs to be rebuilt. Until it is, that intersection backs up on its own schedule rather than responding to actual traffic, a problem Labadie said was most noticeable this past winter when seasonal residents returned and traffic volume climbed. There's no indication the loop has been rebuilt since, so the same fixed-timing backups are worth expecting again once winter season traffic returns.
What This Means If You Walk This Corridor
The practical takeaway is simple. The smoother pavement and new bike lanes are real and already yours to use. But the corridor's actual safety upgrade, the part that gives pedestrians a lighted, activated way to cross at eight specific buildings, is still sitting in a contract with no start date. Watch for a notice-to-proceed announcement from the town, expect any construction near the Highland Beach Club or Coronado Ocean Club to draw scrutiny tied to nesting season, and don't assume the out-of-service sign at 3310 South Ocean is a one-off. It's a preview of exactly the failure this new project is supposed to solve, and it hasn't been solved yet.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property along this stretch, whether it's how a building's proximity to a mid-block crossing might matter to a future buyer, or how nesting season lighting rules intersect with a home you're considering near the beach, the Matt & Nick Team knows this corridor block by block. Contact us if you want a local read before you make your next move.
