Widening plans underway for roads in Oviedo as major development brews 

More roadway expansions are coming to Oviedo as growth accelerates to the east.

Oviedo City Council approved an interlocal agreement with Seminole County Monday, Sept.15  to jointly fund design services for the State Road 426/County Road 419 widening project’s final phase during its recent meeting. 

Seminole County has been working on a long-term project to widen C.R. 419 for more than a decade, beginning in front of Oviedo High School and heading east through the city. For the upcoming third phase of the project, the County plans to widen C.R. 419 from two to four lanes for the 1.2 mile stretch of roadway spanning from Adeline B. Tinsley Way to 0.3 miles west of Lockwood Boulevard. 

The project is a joint effort between the county and city to “accommodate for future population growth and increasing congestion on constrained [roadway] facilities,” according to Seminole County’s 2040 Transportation Plan. 

In March, the City of Oviedo, Florida Department of Transportation and Seminole County celebrated the completion of the project’s second phase — the $21 million construction of a four-lane divided corridor for the 1.4 mile roadway stretching from Pine Avenue to Adeline B. Tinsley Way.

The project also included safety improvements for student crossings near Oviedo High School through the installment of a pedestrian crossing signal known as a pedestrian hybrid beacon, or PHB. 

According to a staff report submitted by City Manager Bryan Cobb, the recently approved agreement will support completion efforts of the project’s third phase by the county and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) as well as “enhance mobility throughout the city.” 

Estimates for its construction costs and timeline are still unknown, as the recently approved agreement only stipulates the cost of the project’s design consultant contract for the third phase. 

“A future [interlocal agreement] addressing the Phase III Widening construction will be forthcoming once the construction costs have been determined,” Cobb wrote.

Seminole County is estimating a cost of more than $1.8 million in design services for the project, 33% of which the city will fund for a total of about $595,000 allocated from the city’s Fourth Generation Sales Tax.

The design process for the project’s third phase was already underway at the the time of the second phase’s completion, according to a Seminole County March 6 Facebook post.

At the project’s March ribbon-cutting ceremony, Seminole County District 1 Commissioner Bob Dallari, who is also a former Oviedo City Council chairman, listed transportation, traffic and congestion as some of the biggest issues in the Oviedo area.

“One of the things I learned early on was that to get through the city of Oviedo, north and south, you always had to go east and west because of the limited roads, and this was one of the cornerstones of that congestion issue,” Dallari said.

Part of the city’s 10-year Mobility Plan is to seek alternatives to widening, including creating a traffic grid pattern to provide more roadway options, and exploring transit options. Questions seeking updates on how the city is working to create that grid were not answered by the city by press time. 

When the city was updating its comprehensive and mobility plans in 2022, the city’s hired consultant from VHB, Senior Traffic Engineer Kok Wan Ma, said “widening a road only induces more traffic on that road, causing a cycle of widening and congestion. 

Concerns over transportation issues extend to expected future growth in Seminole County, which had an official population count of 470,856 in 2020. In January 2024, the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida projected a population of about 537,000 residents for the county in 2045. City officials in Oviedo and Winter Springs had in the past expressed concerns about commuter traffic from other parts of the county and Orange County funneling through the area.

Transportation is a similar concern in bordering Orange County, where problems with roadway capacity are also being addressed through a series of widening projects. Currently, an estimated $6.3 million design process is underway to widen S.R. 50 from east of Avalon Park Blvd to Chuluota Road (C.R. 419) near Bithlo. 

According to the project’s FDOT entry, that roadway is “experiencing significant congestion and future development indicates the need to widen the road from four to six lanes to serve the community’s needs.”

In an Aug. 12 Facebook post, Orange County District 5 Commissioner Kelly Martinez Semrad said a potential widening for Chuloata Road (C.R. 419), spanning north of Colonial Drive (S.R. 50) to Lake Pickett Road, as part of a Roadway Conceptual Analysis would be in part due to The Grow — a controversial residential mixed-use development planned for the Lake Pickett area.

“The County is planning roadway enhancements to accommodate the 2,000+ homes for The Grow on Chulouta Rd.,” Semrad’s post read. “The Grow was approved back in 2017 despite a judge ruling the County had violated its land use plan by promoting urban sprawl.”

The Grow will feature approximately 175,000 square feet of commercial development along the S.R. 50 corridor, as well as a park and community farm in addition to the residential development. 

The planned community is located only about 13 miles from the city if travelling north on C.R. 419 —  a primary thoroughfare for east Seminole County residents that runs through Downtown Oviedo via its intersection of Broadway Street and Central Avenue, which also underwent widening efforts. 

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