5 miles of Wekiva Parkway to open
The construction of several miles of the Wekiva Parkway near Apopka was what Min Cho heard for weeks when she started her mornings and ended her long days of cultivating shrubs: “clang, clang, clang.”
The work and clamor has ceased and Cho, owner of Apopka Nursery on Plymouth Sorrento Road for 30 years, is waiting to learn whether the opening this week of a piece of toll parkway eases congestion on her local roads or lures more people into northwest Orange County.
“I feel like the population here has increased more than 10 times,” Cho said.
On Thursday, the Central Florida Expressway Authority, best known for its flagship State Road 408 through the heart of Orlando, will pull back barricades to allow public use of its newly built 5-mile stretch of Wekiva Parkway.
The newest piece starts at U.S. Highway 441 and extends north to Kelly Park Road, paralleling Plymouth Sorrento Road. With its opening, the Wekiva
Parkway project will still have more than 15 miles of unfinished route.
The parkway, also called State Road 429, is a work in progress, scheduled for completion in 2021 as the last link of a beltway around the Orlando area.
Costing $1.6 billion, the 25-mile project was delayed by controversy over the consequences of crossing the environmentally fragile Wekiva River with a major highway.
Last year, the Florida Department of Transportation opened the inaugural stretch of Wekiva Parkway, a 3-mile jaunt in Lake County.
The new section links directly to other expressways, including Florida’s Turnpike and State Road 408. It will be possible to travel at highway speed without traffic signals from downtown Orlando to deeper into a rural but transitioning area.
And that worries Cho, who said for many years, she could drive along Plymouth Sorrento Road without encountering another car.
“Now, it’s packed,” she said.
The new section of Wekiva Parkway won’t be as busy next year as the much smaller Plymouth Sorrento Road, a two-lane highway carrying an average of 10,000 cars daily.
The Central Florida Expressway Authority projects the parkway section will have a daily average of about 6,300 cars in 2018, 13,600 in 2023 and 20,000 in 2028.
The 3-mile section opened by the state Department of Transportation last year does not yet link on either end to an expressway, but it has gained popularity gradually, with the daily count increasing from about 1,700 cars to about 2,300 cars.
As with the rest of the Wekiva Parkway, there won’t be any way to pay tolls with cash on the newly built section.
Drivers can use a toll transponder or allow expressway cameras to capture licensetag numbers, which will initiate toll billing by mail.
The rate at the toll plaza along the new stretch will be 80 cents for a car equipped with a transponder and $1.39 per car for the “Pay-by-Plate” option.
The 59 cents difference is the cost of Pay-by-Plate processing, road spokeswoman Mary Brooks said.
According to expressway authority estimates, it will take more than 15 years of toll collection to cover the $102 million price tag of the new 5-mile stretch.
That doesn’t include financing or operation costs.