McCulloch Road expansion raises questions of area’s traffic future

As Seminole County and Orange County plan for a transportation future that could see far more cars on the road in a decade or two than today, Seminole County commissioners on Tuesday mulled how to manage that traffic. They showed special concern for the southeast corner of the county’s suburbs, near Oviedo and UCF. 

They also wondered whether an ambitious project decades in the making could finally be seeing traction. 

The McCulloch Road question

Where Oviedo postal addresses end and the University of Central Florida begins lies a shared road that splits what once was a single county into two and could soon see an expansion to four lanes. 

Spanning a straight shot east from the heavily traveled State Road 434 into a frontier where newly rooted neighborhoods give way to old Florida scrub forests, McCulloch Road grew from a dirt road in 1978 to a four-lane thoroughfare by the mid-1990s. But a nearly two-mile section of its eastern end remains a two-lane road leading to the area’s newest neighborhood and the Econ River Wilderness Area’s seemingly endless thicket of pines and shell trails. 

Brian Sanders, chief planner with Orange County’s Transportation Planning Division, stood before the Seminole County Commission Tuesday morning to explain the plan for the potential expansion of the road to four lanes. But that soon gave way to discussion of the area’s larger transportation woes and what can be done about it. 

“An incredible amount of development happened in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s,” Sanders said. That gave way to more traffic, peaking at two points during the post-Great Recession boom of the 2010s.  

In the year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, nearly 25,000 cars per day drove down the four-lane portion of McCulloch Road, spanning between Alafaya Trail and Lockwood Boulevard. But after March 2020, that fell dramatically, dropping to just over 14,000 vehicles, which still has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. 

Planning for a higher-traffic future

But the future numbers are looking to be bigger, Sanders said, possibly much bigger. Based on projections he showed, by 2038 the minimum traffic flow through the area will likely eclipse the highest pre-pandemic peaks. 

“Significant travel delay issues will happen, coming up,” Sanders said. 

That also leads to a chance for more crashes. An Orange County crash analysis, using data from 2017-2022, showed that McCulloch has a higher rate of traffic crashes than similar sized roads in the state. 

One way to reduce collisions: narrowing lane widths and lowering speeds. The estimated $33 million plan proposed by Orange County, which, in a joint maintenance agreement with Seminole County, maintains most of the two-lane section in question, involves turning the two-lane eastern section of McCulloch Road into a four-lane section, but narrowing the lanes to 11 feet wide. Traffic engineers said this reduces speeds and potentially reduces crashes. 

But the widening wouldn’t come without effects to the side of the road. Stormwater management, just a few hundred yards from where the Econ River regularly overflows its banks during extended rainstorms, would be critical, Sanders said. That involves finding places to route water that could otherwise flood homes in those unincorporated Oviedo and Orange County addresses. The idea: a nearly 2-acre “flood plain compensation area” just west of the West Hampton neighborhood on the Seminole County side of the road. 

“That floodplain compensation – that will affect that community, and I really think that it shouldn’t, and there needs to be another way to address that,” Commissioner Bob Dallari said. 

Commissioners question the need for the project

That led to questions of why the expansion was being considered in the first place, in light of recent drops in traffic, though traffic volume has gradually recovered in the past four years, according to Orange County data. 

“There’s really been, from our citizen standpoint, no outcry to widen this road yet, and I’m sure at some point it will,” Dallari said. “The big intersection improvement that needs to happen is at [S.R.] 434 and McCulloch Road.” 

That frequently choked intersection, where residents entering and leaving both counties on their way to and from Oviedo, UCF and beyond, would only get worse with a wider road leading to it, Dallari said. 

“All we’re doing is getting people quicker to that intersection and developing a big parking lot,” he said. 

One resident was quick to point out the math of the situation as he saw it. 

“I can’t imagine why in the wild wild world of sports you all would entertain anything to benefit Orange County’s proposal here, because the numbers just said only 15% of the traffic is Seminole County traffic, so 85% of the traffic is Orange County,” nearby resident Bill Hyde said. “A hundred percent of the benefit is to Orange County. Why are we even having this discussion? Just say no.” 

Another way through: The Richard Crotty Parkway

That led to Seminole County commissioners and Orange County staffers discussing the future of another project entirely: The proposed Richard Crotty Parkway, a 9.5-mile road between and roughly paralleling University Boulevard and Colonial Drive, spanning from State Road 436 to potentially as far east as State Road 434 at UCF. It could ease east-west traffic just south of where the counties meet. 

“Something’s got to happen there,” Commission Chairman Jay Zembower said. “[The McCulloch expansion] is a short gap fix for the bigger problem of moving east and west.” 

“We are working on the Richard Crotty Parkway,” Sanders said. “We’ve just purchased or are in the process of purchasing a large piece of property that gets us up to Hanging Moss [Road] from [State Road 436].” 

But the project to acquire land in the road’s path has taken years, with numerous situations requiring eminent domain to make way for the road. In the meantime, an apartment complex, The Verge, was built directly in the path of the road where it could potentially ease congestion near UCF.

“That roadway is littered with land mines here and there but we are actually working on that in earnest,” Sanders said. It also will take more years ahead to acquire all the property, he said. 

Commissioners’ big worry: a rural highway across the Econ

A big fear if McCulloch Road is used by more residents and then tapped for expansion beyond the current plan: how close it would get to the Econ River, and what that might trigger. 

Dallari was direct about his worry. 

“What I’m concerned about is as we get closer to the river, I’m afraid that the state or someone could preempt us to go over the river, and I’m opposed to that,” Dallari said. 

Commissioner Lee Constantine agreed. 

“We have fought very hard to maintain and protect that area, and having another bridge go over the Econ is problematic. Extremely problematic,” Constantine said. 

What’s next

A May 21 Orange County Land Planning Agency meeting will discuss the plan further before it moves to a presentation at the Orange County Commission June 2, after which the McCulloch Road project could be moved toward planning and design. 

“This has been on our transportation plan…it remains a part of the long-term identified needs for this county,” Seminole County Public Works Director Tawny Olore said. “While we may only have 15% of the traffic, as our residents utilize this road, they’re stuck in the traffic from either visitors or residents of Orange County. So I think the need is there.”

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