Canal Road Corridor plan coming soon
Canal Road Corridor plan coming soon
By John Mullen
Ryan Shamburger at Big Beach Brewing Co.’s business sits a few 100 feet from the 90-degree intersection at Canal Road and East Second Street in Gulf Shores.
Volkert engineering firm is trying to find an alternative to the turn and is doing a study for the city on easing this bottleneck.
“I get asked often when (the city) might give us an update for the Canal Corridor Project,” Shamburger said during a recent council meeting.
He got what Public Works Director Mark Acreman believes is good news.
“We were able to achieve routing that traffic around the community and not through the community,” Acreman said. “We’re getting some final blessings on some of those alignments now. I’m hoping maybe within the next 30 days and no more than 60 we can have something back to you guys to see again just to show you the progress we’ve made.”
But it’s not without some hurdles to overcome with government permitting. Gulf Shores must deal with the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and the Army Corps of Engineering.
One route might cross a smidgen of Gulf State Park and both may affect wetlands in the area. The city is looking to go south of the neighborhood bordered by Canal Road on the north and East Second Street on the west.
“We actually met with some of the governmental bodies that will have a major say in the alignment last week,” Acreman. “Those discussions I felt were very positive and so we should be coming back in the very near future with a new corridor.”
Acreman said a minimal amount of tweaks were suggested by the officials at the meeting.
“When we presented this a couple of months back, we knew we had to get some government buy-ins from the DCR, the Corps of Engineers,” Acreman said. “We’ve met with a lot of those groups and it has changed the alignment a little bit.”
The two routes in question would have traffic turn south onto East 10th Street and connect with a new road that will have a westward turn until it heads west to connect to Dolphin Avenue. There’s a light at Dolphin and East Second Street which will give traffic access to the ICW bridge by going straight or to the beach by turning left and catching State Route 59 there.
Gulf Shores officials hope this change will make pedestrian traffic going from the Waterway Village District on the west side of Second Street East at West 24th Avenue to the neighborhood where Shamburger’s brewery, Meyer Park and residential housing are located.