10 minute read
Market Spotlight: Port St. Lucie
The Crosstown Parkway Extension crossing over the St. Lucie River features a waterfront park. (Photos courtesy of the City of Port St. Lucie)
BY JOE VANHOOSE, Managing Editor
INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS HELP ACCOMMODATE GROWTH
In 2019, the City of Port St. Lucie celebrated the long-awaited third crossing over the St. Lucie River in Port St. Lucie with the opening of the Crosstown Parkway Extension.
Forty years in the making, this project included careful planning to overcome legal challenges and weather events. The 1.5-mile corridor improvement project and 4,100-ft-long bridge combined pile supports with Florida I-beams and a cast-in-place deck.
The bridge traverses an environmentally sensitive area, which required minimization of wetland impacts and protection of the Savannas Preserve State Park. The new bridge provides a new hurricane evacuation route, relief to longtime traffic congestion in the growing city and a waterfront park the community can celebrate.
And it’s one of many projects that are helping Port St. Lucie handle its explosive growth over the past few decades.
Meeting a Longtime Need
Port St. Lucie is divided by the North Fork of the St. Lucie River. After experiencing exponential growth the last few decades, the city is densely populated on the west side of the river, with a hospital, medical offices, and shopping located on the east side.
Until the Crosstown Parkway bridge was complete, the city only had two roadway crossings of the river — both of which were seriously above capacity — that also served as the coastal city’s only two hurricane evacuation routes.
City planners saw a need for a third river crossing more than 40 years ago. When they first added the crossing to their comprehensive plan in 1980, fewer than 15,000 people lived inside the Port St. Lucie city limits. By 2000, the population had soared to nearly 90,000. Today, Port St. Lucie is the seventh most-populated city in the state and the fifth fastest growing city in the U.S with more than 231,000 residents.
“We knew we had to build this project,” said Port St. Lucie Project Manager Frank Knott. “‘No’ was an answer we couldn’t accept.”
Port St. Lucie voters approved a $165 million general obligation bond to support the construction of the Crosstown Parkway across the city and the river. The city undertook construction of supporting segments, including an interchange at I-95 and a bridge over Florida’s Turnpike starting back in 2007.
But by 2010, the project was again at an impasse. Port St. Lucie’s city manager at the time, Don Cooper, was able to work with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to develop a regulatory mitigation plan and proprietary mitigation plan.
“The proprietary mitigation plan was made up of some projects that DEP couldn’t fund but were on the books for years,” Knott said. “We agreed that we would do those projects, which had to be built before Crosstown opened.”
Design-Build Creates Concurrency
The PD&E process for the project took more than 10 years, leaving federal funding jeopardized and on the brink of expiration if the city of Port St. Lucie did not let for construction soon. To secure the funding, the city used design-build to expedite the process.
Because of the corridor’s route across sensitive wetlands in the Savannas Preserve State Park, the design-build team of RS&H and Archer Western Contractors sought to minimize the effects of an expected contentious environmental permitting process by using geotechnical information obtained from adjacent river channels.
“To minimize the environmental challenges, we designed the bridge with geotechnical information that had been obtained from the land side approaches, with intentions to complete geotechnical investigations via a temporary trestle during construction,” said RS&H Project Manager Rachel Back, PE, CFM. “We obtained subsurface borings from the temporary construction trestle as part of the overall project permit, which eliminated the need for a separate taskrelated permit.”
“We knew we had to build this project... ‘No’ was an answer we couldn’t accept.
Along with minimizing the project’s environmental footprint, the temporary trestle would also prove valuable in facilitating longer spans and improving overall construction quality. The trestle was installed linearly to reach the entire width of the bridge, and bores were taken as it progressed the length of the bridge.
The bridge still faced a year-long environmental permit challenge, but the project team made the most of the delay. More than 60 pile caps were precast while rights-of-way were acquired and the utilities relocated. The precast pile caps required multiple mock-ups to perfect the casting process and ensure a perfect fit between the piles and the caps.
“This was at-risk work that could only be done because of the design-build project delivery,” said Back. “Several tasks were able to happen concurrently during the permitting stage so that, once permits were in place, construction could quickly begin.”
Superstreet Debut in Florida
The Crosstown Parkway corridor also includes a first of its kind in Florida: a superstreet intersection at Crosstown Parkway and Floresta Drive.
Superstreet intersections are a type of restricted crossing U-turn intersection – as defined by the Federal Highway Administration – designed for situations where the through traffic on the major road is much denser than the cross-street traffic.
Traffic analysis showed that the traffic would fail based on the design of a traditional intersection — the projection for the year it was to open was already a failing design. But when the superstreet model was analyzed, the level of service for the opening year improved from Level E to Level B. Even in the design year 20 years in the future, traffic is projected to still be at Level C, Back said.
Travelers on the Crosstown Parkway treat the intersection the same as any traditional signalized intersection, able to travel through, turn left or turn right. Those on Floresta Drive, however, can only turn right at the intersection. They can then go through signalized, synchronized U-turns in order to travel through the intersection or to turn left.
The intersection eliminates a signal phase, resulting in significant time savings for motorists. Traffic analysis for Crosstown Parkway and Floresta Drive indicated the average delay time was eight times faster than with a fourleg intersection design.
Safety is also greatly improved by reducing the conflict points from 32 to 14, reducing the frequency and severity of crashes. Pedestrian safety is improved even more than vehicular safety, reducing conflict points from 24 to 8 while providing a large median refuge island.
Award-Winning Community Asset
With the project in the planning stages for 40 years, the city and project team worked diligently to make this longstanding Crosstown Parkway Extension project happen.
It was truly a City project. Everyone was involved –the legal department, procurement, parks and recreation, our public works department. Everybody played a role.
Everything was thought of meticulously; the design-build team created a durable structure with a lifecycle of about 75 years while including imaginative techniques that improve safety and mobility.
“Walter England (the city’s longtime engineer) worked tirelessly to get the project going, and Patricia Roebling, his successor, kept it going,” Knott said. “It was truly a City project. Everyone was involved – the legal department, procurement, parks and recreation, our public works department. Everybody played a role.”
No one involved envisioned the project as simply a bridge that connects two segments of the city. The Crosstown Parkway also provides access to new waterfront areas, added a waterfront park, trailhead, canoe launch, art features, bike lanes, sidewalks, and makes the corridor a walkable, scenic area to be used and enjoyed by the residents.
Innovation in the design-build process allowed the incorporation of new sustainable features. Tiered walls, lighting, towers featuring commissioned Guy Harvey tile murals and sculptures, extensive landscaping, and scenic overlooks were included early into the design – aesthetics were never an afterthought.
Despite being interrupted twice by hurricanes, the project was completed two months early with no recordable safety incidents. With the project team’s innovations in design and construction, they brought the price $13 million under budget despite the added scope. An estimated 10,000 residents attended the grand opening in September 2019.
Since its completion, the project has been a praised achievement for the community and has won several industry awards.
The Design-Build Institute of America (DBIA) honored the Crosstown Parkway Extension with the National Award of Excellence in Transportation. Engineering News-Record recognized it as Best of the Best in the Highway/ Bridge category Nationally and for the Southeast Region. Roads & Bridges celebrated it as a Top 10 Bridge.
The project also won the Engineering Excellence Grand Award by ACEC Florida.
Supporting Other Mobility Projects
While the Crosstown Parkway Extension is still celebrated in the city, Port St. Lucie continues to work each day to implement and identify future projects to support growth and mobility.
In 2018, residents in the city approved a halfcent sales tax referendum that would provide funding to help improve the quality of life, public safety, safer roads, bridges and sidewalks. City officials identified several projects that would be completed with the half-cent sales tax money.
One project identified was the Floresta Drive Improvement Corridor Project, a 4.1-mile, twolane roadway from Southbend to Prima Vista Boulevard used by residents who live along the corridor. Floresta Drive also provides access to three major roadways.
The project was originally conceived as a fourlane section but ultimately put on hold after the 2008 recession. Input was collected from residents starting in 2017 with multiple public meetings. The project was modified based on resident input to include a two-lane complete street roadway that would support projected traffic volumes and encourage safe and efficient traffic flow. Construction for the project started in 2020.
The city worked closely with FDOT on all activities along Port St. Lucie Boulevard. The project also includes a new roundabout on Floresta Drive at Thanksgiving Avenue and median openings at Portage Avenue, Essex Drive and Ablett Lane. Raised landscaped medians were added for better access management, and stormwater treatment ponds were added at Essex Drive with a sidewalk and workout equipment and at Port St. Lucie Boulevard with a fountain feature.
The Floresta Drive Phase 1 Project was one of nine projects awarded a grant by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD).
The grant was used to retrofit the Kingsway Waterway outfall, located within the project corridor, with baffle boxes to reduce nutrient discharges in runoff to the North Fork of the St. Lucie River.
Phase 1 of Floresta Drive is complete and has transformed this residential street.
Residents in Port St. Lucie can now enjoy a scenic roadway with sidewalks, pedestrian crossing safety enhancements, buffered bicycle lanes, lighting and landscaping features. Landscaping along with the other implemented safety treatments and traffic calming features are helping encourage traffic to slow down and helping motorists recognize this corridor as a neighborhood street.
The project enhanced safety and accessibility for pedestrians and bicycles as this phase 1 corridor connects to businesses, churches, schools and daycares. Phase 2 of the Floresta Drive Project is currently under construction.
