Traffic Study to Begin on Blueberry Road and Highway 20
Freeport residents will soon see traffic counting devices installed along Blueberry Road and Highway 20 as the city launches a formal traffic study of one of its most congested corridors.
The City of Freeport announced this week that the counting equipment — familiar road tubes and similar standard tools that track vehicle volumes and turning movements — will be placed along the corridor starting next week. The devices are part of the traffic study the City Council approved at its September 8 meeting, when members signed off on a $36,500 scope of services assigning the Blueberry Road/State Road 20 project to North Florida Professional Services.
The study is the first concrete step in an effort that residents and council members have pushed for months. At the council’s August 11 meeting, a project manager with the Florida Department of Transportation’s SR 20 resurfacing team explained that a turn lane the city wants at Blueberry Road cannot be built until a traffic operations study exists for the location — FDOT requires the study before any turn lane on the state highway system can be funded or constructed. Blueberry Road sits just outside the limits of the state’s resurfacing project, leaving the city to commission the study itself if it wants the improvement to move forward.
The corridor has become a daily frustration for drivers. Councilwoman Elizabeth Brannon has described gridlock so severe that residents struggle to reach the grocery store, with GPS systems rerouting drivers through residential neighborhoods to escape backups — and she has said the council is willing to spend city money on a state-owned highway because the Florida Department of Transportation has not delivered help.
If the study supports turn lanes, the city has a path to build them at reduced cost. The FDOT representative told the council that once Freeport completes its own traffic study and engineers turn lane plans that receive state approval, the city could negotiate directly with the resurfacing project’s contractor to build the improvements — potentially saving money because mobilization expenses would already be covered. He cautioned, however, that timing matters: the resurfacing project carries an approximately 400-day construction window, and coordinating a separate contractor after the state’s contractor takes over the roadway becomes complicated.
For now, the message to drivers is a simple one: the road tubes and counting devices appearing along Blueberry Road and Highway 20 in the coming days are not construction. They are the measurement work that will determine whether the turn lanes the city wants can be justified, funded, and built.
Originally reported by City of Freeport (Facebook). Image: City of Freeport (YouTube).
