"The barrels have been removed and the bike lane conflicts with turn lanes have been marked," Town Manager Marshall Labadie told residents in January, closing the book on more than a year of construction along Ocean Boulevard. Substantial completion was scheduled for the following week. The state's repaving, widening, and bike lane project, the one that turned every commute and beach walk along A1A into a detour for over a year, was finished.
Except it wasn't. Buried in that same January update was an admission that the piece pedestrians actually use, the lighted crossings that let someone step off the shared-use path and cross four lanes of coastal highway safely, hadn't been funded yet. It took until August for that gap to close, and when it did, the fix turned out to be more interesting than a routine safety upgrade. The town isn't just adding lights. It's paying to correct a problem its own repaving project created.
What "Substantially Complete" Left Out
Back in January, Labadie was candid about what remained. The road itself was done: wider lanes, fresh asphalt, new bike lanes. But the lighted crosswalk signals that were supposed to accompany the project had been separated out, and their funding depended on a legislative ask from State Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman. If Tallahassee didn't come through, Labadie said, the town would look at budgeting for it themselves.
Seven months later, in August, the Town Commission approved a $283,920 contract with Lux Solar Inc., a Delray Beach-based contractor, as part of a broader $375,000 state-funded pedestrian safety project. The scope covers eight mid-block crossings along Ocean Boulevard, each getting in-road embedded LED lighting that flashes bi-directionally when a pedestrian hits the existing push button. It's the same infrastructure residents already use to cross, just finally wired to actually get a driver's attention.
There's a detail in the contract language worth sitting with: Lux Solar is the same company that installed the original lighting infrastructure at these crossings. This isn't a new vendor learning the corridor. It's the original installer coming back to finish a job that got split into two funding cycles.
The Fix Is Also a Repair
Here's the part that separates this from a routine infrastructure update. The project scope doesn't stop at the crosswalks. It also includes milling, repaving, and regrading sections of the shared-use path that runs alongside A1A, specifically to address elevation and drainage changes caused by the recent FDOT resurfacing. That resurfacing, the one Labadie called substantially complete in January, raised and reshaped parts of the roadway in ways that changed how water drains off the adjacent path. The result has been standing water and, in places, pedestrians forced into the travel lane just to get around it.
In plain terms: the same project that widened the road and added bike lanes also broke the walking path next to it, and a separate $375,000 grant is now paying to fix that side effect. If you've walked or biked A1A after a rainstorm this year and found yourself stepping into traffic to avoid a puddle, this is the reason, and it's finally getting addressed with the same contract that's adding the crosswalk lights.
Where the Eight Crossings Actually Sit
The eight locations aren't spread evenly across the corridor. Reading them by milepost tells a different story than reading them as a flat list of addresses:
The north and south edges, spaced far apart:
- Grand Court, milepost 5.017
- Regency Highland, milepost 5.89
- Monterey House, milepost 6.817
- Delray Sands Resort, milepost 7.137
The dense middle stretch, four crossings in under half a mile:
- Toscana Towers, milepost 6.15
- Highland Beach Club, milepost 6.293
- Coronado Ocean Club, milepost 6.507
- Ambassadors East, milepost 6.577
That middle cluster, from Toscana to Ambassadors East, covers roughly 0.43 miles and contains half of the entire project's crossings. Meanwhile Grand Court at the north end and Delray Sands Resort at the south end sit more than two miles apart, with only two crossings, Regency Highland and Monterey House, in between them. If your building falls in that Toscana-to-Ambassadors East stretch, you're getting meaningfully denser pedestrian infrastructure than someone near Grand Court or Delray Sands, who will have a longer walk to reach a lit crossing once the work is done.
This matters beyond convenience. These are mid-block crossings by definition, meaning they sit between signalized intersections like the one at A1A and Linton Boulevard, not at them. For most of the corridor, a mid-block crossing is the only practical way to get across Ocean Boulevard on foot without walking well out of your way. Where the town chose to concentrate its new lighting, and where it didn't, shapes daily foot traffic patterns up and down A1A for years.
The Six-Month Clock Hasn't Started
One more detail worth knowing before you start watching for construction crews: the contract requires Lux Solar to complete the work within six months of receiving a formal notice to proceed from the town. As of the August approval, that notice hadn't been issued, and no date was available for when it would be. So while the funding and the contractor are locked in, the actual start date is still an open question.
Practically, that means anyone budgeting their fall and winter walks around eventual construction closures shouldn't expect a firm timeline yet. It also means the town's own January framing, that the project was "substantially complete," undersold how much work was still ahead. The road was done. The thing that keeps pedestrians safe crossing it wasn't, and even now, it's a six-month clock that hasn't started ticking.
What This Means If You Walk A1A
If you live between Toscana Towers and Ambassadors East, you're about to have four separate lit crossings within a short walk of each other, more concentrated pedestrian infrastructure than almost anywhere else in town. If you're closer to Grand Court or Delray Sands Resort, your nearest lit crossing may still require a longer walk than you'd expect for a town this size.
Either way, the drainage fix matters more than the lights themselves for day-to-day use. If you've been stepping around standing water on the shared-use path near your building, that's the part of this project actually addressing what you've been dealing with, not the flashing lights, which are really about driver visibility more than pedestrian convenience.
For residents in the high-rises along this stretch, most of which run on condo association budgets already under pressure from Florida's newer structural reserve requirements, infrastructure timelines like this one are worth tracking alongside building-level maintenance schedules. We've written separately about how reserve funding rules are reshaping risk for Highland Beach condo buyers, and the same instinct applies here: know what's actually been fixed, what's been patched, and what's still pending before you assume a project is finished just because someone said so in a press release.
If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Ocean Boulevard, or you already call it home and want a clearer read on what's happening block by block, Jason Litt tracks these details because they're part of what it actually means to live here. Browse more on the Highland Beach neighborhood page, or if you're curious what a home in this corridor is worth right now given everything changing around it, get a free home valuation and get a straight answer.
