Lauren Ritchie:

Road plan could be boon for commuters.

Folks in west Orange County and the increasingly crowded area over the border to south Lake are about to get a little surprise in the way of a traffic reliever.

The Central Florida Expressway Authority announced recently that it’s considering construction of a 5-mile stretch of road to connect U.S. Highway 27 in Lake County to State Road 429 in Orange, a toll highway west of Walt Disney World and part of the beltway around Orlando.

The connector would carry an estimated 8,000 vehicles by 2025 and seems to have enthusiastic support on the expressway panel for a variety of reasons — including at least one that has nothing to do with driving from Point A to Point B.

Authority maps show three options for the road, but one has become the standout: It’s the southern route that begins in Lake near an entrance to Lake Louisa Park on U.S. 27 and continues east across Schofield Road to hook up with the expressway at the current Schofield Road interchange, where the 429 takes a little jog toward Lake.

Authority officials said the corridor for the proposed roadway is wider than it appears on the agency’s map, so the route could veer away from the current Schofield Road in the end. Spokesman Brian Hutchings said local roads around the route already are congested.

“There’s a lot of development out there and more on the books. So really, the time to act is now because if it gets developed, that makes it much more expensive to build a road,” he said. “We’re trying to get ahead of that and beat development coming through.”

Hmm. Maybe. More often, expressway routes have been about opening land to development rather than accommodating what’s already there. But that’s always the chicken-and-egg question, isn’t it? Which comes first, roads or development?

Still, in this current superheated building atmosphere, Hutchings’ assertion has a good bit of truth.

Four Corners resident Jose Gonzalez said his neighbors are excited about the prospect of the new road. He said he spends at least 20 minutes driving to a route that will get him quickly into downtown Orlando and other points east.

For example, he said, his son attended Windermere Preparatory School in west Orange.

“There was no easy way to get there. Sometimes, when I decided to be adventurous, I’d take Schofield Road — it’s dirt and clay and goes miles into groves. It would cut off 20 or 25 minutes going that way,” he said. “Of course, there was a chance of you being stuck, and you’d definitely have to wash your car.

“If they build this, I tell you that personally, I’d use it.”

Jim Stivender, the longtime Lake County public works director and unofficial road guru, said the southern proposal for the connec-