BITHLO, Fla. — Central Florida is booming, but are our roads keeping up? Residents in an Orange County neighborhood said congestion is bad and just keeps getting worse.
9 Investigates analyzed crash data and road project plans to determine when residents can really expect relief.
“More people, more traffic, every single day,” Aron Christopher, a Bithlo resident, said.
“We have 500 cars that go by our house a day,” Pamela Sible, a Bithlo resident, said.
“We need people to care about Bithlo,” Lee-Ann Snipes, a Bithlo resident, said. “I’ve lived out here for 40 years, there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be fixed.”
From an early-morning drive to a midday commute, it’s clear there are more people, more developments, and more cars than ever on State Road 50 in Bithlo.
“Congestion, straight congestion, hard to get to work, hard to get anywhere you need to go fast,” Christopher said.
Related-->Crashes surge 300 percent at State Road 50 Intersection, FDOT fix remains years away
9 Investigates looked into traffic trends using data from the Florida Department of Transportation.
Let’s look at the 3-mile stretch of East Colonial Drive from Chuluota Road to State Road 520. In the last five years, traffic here has grown by 3,000 cars per day, and not everyone arrived safely at their destination.
MetroPlan Orlando data showed 246 crashes at or near SR- 50 and South Tanner Road between 2021 and June of this year. Six of those crashes were deadly.
From 2023 to 2024 alone the number of crashes in that same area increased by more than 300%.
That’s a sharp jump, and it raises a bigger question: are congested roads also impacting safety?
“We have a lot of speeding; we have a lot of fatalities happening on E. Colonial Dr.,” Snipes said. “A lot of things need to be addressed out here.”
We asked Orange County Transportation planners why development keeps happening when residents feel the roads are already too crowded.
They told us that evaluating road capacity is part of the review process and developers are sometimes required to pay for their own traffic studies to determine whether the local roads can handle more traffic.
If a road doesn’t meet the county’s traffic flow standards developers can be asked to make improvements or contribute to future transportation projects.
There’s a catch.
Major road projects can take years to fund, plan, design, acquire land and build.
And under Florida law developers who meet certain requirements may still move forward even when road capacity is a problem. That means projects can be completed before road improvements have a chance to catch up.
In East Orange County, state transportation officials said they have a widening project in the works including a plan to expand SR- 50 from Avalon Park Boulevard to Chuluota Road to three lanes in each direction with a raised median and other safety improvements.
Construction is expected to start by the end of 2027.
Another widening project, from Chuluota Road to SR- 520 is currently in design, with construction planned for 2029.
That’s not much comfort to the people who drive here now.
“All this growth,” Sible said. “We have to come up with a solution.”
In June, Orange County approved $20 million to help speed up improvements, with their construction expected to start in 2027 instead of 2029.
“We want to make sure they have safety measures as we get even more traffic,” Sible said.
County officials said they’re also collecting feedback from residents to identify short-term safety improvements.
For the people who live there, the question is how quickly their concerns can result in changes on the ground.
“That we’re not just a forgotten soul out here that nobody cares about Bithlo because we’re a bunch of hillbillies or something,” William Pons, a Bithlo resident, said.
The county is collecting feedback from residents, contact info is listed here: Bithlo Traffic Study
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