Gulf Shores, Ala. – Will the rerouting of Canal Road through the Gulf Pines neighborhood around Meyer Park help with traffic on the State Route 59 bridge in Gulf Shores?

With officials planning to go out to bid for a pedestrian bridge in late 2022 or early 2023, after crossing the Gulf Shores bridge traffic won’t be able to use the 90-degree turn near Tacky Jacks and Big Beach Brewing to avoid the toll and continue to Orange Beach. In July, Mayor Robert Craft said traffic studies show that 25 percent of the traffic coming over the Holmes Bridge is ultimately heading to Orange Beach.

That begs the question: Will the detour snaking through residential Gulf Pines discourage visitors heading to Orange Beach but avoiding the toll from using the Holmes Bridge? Will it drive more traffic to the toll bridge or will Orange Beach visitors continue south all the way to beach road then head east to Orange Beach?

Ultimately, a bypass to the south of the neighborhood through Gulf State Park is hoped for but currently the state has not committed funding to the reroute of State Route 180 off Canal Road and unto the new spur.

Ryan Shamburger not only lives in Gulf Pines, his family also owns Big Beach Brewing sitting a few yards from 90-degree turn where the pedestrian bridge is planned.

“I haven’t seen the design for the detour,” Shamburger said. “My guess it would not be a detour that speeds people through here. It’ll kind of be somewhat of a deterrent to make people go to the beach road or the toll bridge. This is a way to pass through but we’re not going to have a high speed limit going right by Meyer Park.”

During Monday’s city council meeting, City Engineer Mark Acreman told the council plans for the routing of the detour through the neighborhood are being studied.

“Our traffic consultant Skipper and Associates is currently modeling multiple routes to determine which one will be the best for the community,” Acreman said. “With that we’ll have a detour route that will be a short-term solution to accommodate the traffic through the neighborhood as we build the pedestrian bridge. The detour routing will be constructed at the time the pedestrian bridge begins so that detour route will be in place before we can take out a portion of Highway 180.”

The pedestrian bridge and the Gulf Pines bypass are still in the permitting stage but a Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development or BUILD grant is funding the bridge. The city had hoped to use RESTORE funding supplemented by money from ALDOT to pay for the bypass.

“We have joint partnerships with ALDOT to build that road, Canal Road reroute,” Mayor Robert Craft said at an April 19 town hall meeting. “We had this road planned and it was going to be jointly funded by a RESTORE grant that the city got as well as with ALDOT’s participation. It was designed to go from Fort Morgan Road all the way back up to the new bridge or to the toll bridge if the new bridge wasn’t built. That’s come apart because ALDOT is not willing to now fund that road or help fund that road.”

During that meeting, Craft also said ALDOT was bluffing when it spent $20 million for the right of way necessary to build a spur road leading from the Beach Express south across Cotton Creek Drive and to an eventual bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway. The state is in negotiations with the Baldwin County Bridge which is proposing to add a second two-lane span over the waterway and the new bridge project was pulled from the bid letting list twice.

Now it appears ALDOT lost interest in the bypass once bidding on the bridge project was halted. Now the vital bypass is in limbo.

“To be determined on where we are on that,” Craft said. “We have no timeframe to be able to talk about that because we just don’t know. We spent a lot of time with this neighborhood trying to let the neighborhood to give us input on where this road needs to go. We worked great with the state park to endorse allowing us to go through there.”