S.R. 434 gridlock gets a $63,000 safety study
Michael Meldeau feels like he plays a real-life version of the video game Frogger every time he drives out of his Winter Springs neighborhood and on to State Road 434 during morning rush hours.
He will sit in his car and wait — sometimes for several minutes — for a gap in traffic on the busy two-lane road just east of State Road 417.
“And if you want to turn left, it can be dangerous,” said Meldeau, about driving out of the Barrington Estates neighborhood. “You have a lot of people in a hurry in the mornings, trying to get to work. ... It is literally an accident waiting to happen.”
That’s why Seminole County and the state’s Department of
Transportation plan to launch a safety study of S.R. 434 between Spring Avenue in Winter Springs and Magnolia Street in Oviedo, a distance of about 2.5 miles.
The study will take a look at whether motorists can easily turn onto S.R. 434 from side streets and neighborhoods, if there is a way to slow traffic, if there are
enough streetlights, and whether new traffic signals should be installed. It also will examine whether to build wider shoulders and more turn lanes to ease the flow of traffic.
“Hopefully we can find some solutions that will improve the situation,” said Brett Blackadar, Seminole’s county engineer.
On any given day, about 22,000 cars and trucks use that portion of S.R. 434. And to make matters worse for drivers and nearby resi-
dents, the road makes a curving 90-degree turn just north of downtown Oviedo.
The study — expected to cost nearly $63,000 — will also look at whether a roundabout can be built at the curve as a way to slow down traffic and give motorists from side streets time to drive on to S.R. 434.
In the past two years, there have been a total of 20 serious crashes on S.R. 434 between the S.R. 417 overpass and that curve, according to the Florida Highway
Patrol. That includes a twovehicle crash in December 2013 in which two people — including an 8-year-old boy — were killed and three others injured.
Winter Springs Commissioner Kevin Cannon said one of the problems is the narrowing of S.R. 434 from four lanes just west of the S.R. 417 overpass to two lanes east of the overpass. That means drivers rush to get ahead of the traffic bottleneck.
“I’ve had constituents
come to me and tell me it’s dangerous,” Cannon said. “So let’s get in front of this before another terrible accident happens.”
Seminole County plans to widen S.R. 434 between S.R. 417 and East Mitchell Hammock Road. But that’s still years away.
“So let’s do an interim safety study to see what issues we can address now,” Blackadar said.
When Chris Lemnah first moved into the Barrington Estates subdivision in 2007, he didn’t mind the two-lane 434 because there wasn’t as much traffic as today.
But today, he would not oppose having the road widened to four lanes.
“The growth in Winter Springs and Oviedo has been pretty dramatic in recent years,” Lemnah said. “Making a lefthand turn [on to S.R. 434] today can be problematic.”