Eastward Ho!

An accident or someone just changing a tire on the side of

Interstate 75 often turns the 30-mile sprint between Fort Myers and Naples into

a marathon, frustrating drivers. Government agencies have ambitious plans to

improve the interstate, but drivers can expect things to get worse before they

get better.

As relentless population growth continues here, residential

and business development is pushing east from built-out areas in the west to

the interstate corridor. Traffic will only continue to increase on the

Southwest Florida stretch of the 1,775-mile-long interstate that runs from Michigan

to Miami, experts agree, and practically no one thinks road builders will be

able to keep up the pace.

“Roadway expansion will come two or three years too late for

any of our tastes. There will be that odd wreck that shuts the interstate down

for two or three hours, and that will happen more often than any of us would

like,” predicts David Stevens, a principal with Grubb & Ellis/IPC, a

commercial real estate firm in Naples. “I don’t foresee us being able to do

anything about it.”

Dozens of projects along the interstate will bring thousands

of new residences and hotel rooms, along with millions of square feet of new

retail, research, office and warehouse space. Interchanges, real estate

executives say, will some day host far more than the gas stations, fast-food

outlets and pastures and cows drivers now see, and the road one day may

supplant U.S. 41 as the region’s Main Street.

“For the majority of my career, the preference was to be on

U.S. 41 and west of 41,” says Stevens, who’s worked in commercial real estate

here since 1983. “The populace that everybody was trying to serve was on the

west side of the Trail.”

Population trends and geography make development east of the

interstate inevitable, according to Stevens. “It was only a matter of time before

the dam burst,” he says. “We’ve been sitting here looking at double-digit

growth for 30 years. You think, ‘Where the heck are they going to go?’ When you

look at a bigger map, you say, ‘Here’s where they’re going to go—between the

Gulf and 951, and they’re going to shoot right up that developable area where

it’s not swamp.’” Within a couple of miles on each side of I-75, that is.

Thus it’s crucial to keep traffic moving on the interstate,

Stevens says, and not just to keep tourists happy. Naples and Fort Myers are already creeping toward each other to

form a mini-megalopolis, meeting at a hub formed by TECO Arena, Alico Road, Southwest Florida International Airport

and Florida Gulf Coast University. As the two cities meld into one region, each

will depend on the other even more for commerce. Because the cost of housing

has become so high in much of Naples, and because its growing population

consists of so many wealthy retirees who have no interest in working, labor has

already started to come from outside the area. The solution: Ensure smooth flow

on the interstate to get workers in and out, and locate businesses close to the

federal highway so they can be as accessible as possible to employees and

customers.

Many small firms catering to upper-echelon clients—law

firms, accountants and the like—will remain close to U.S. 41 and their high-end

customers living by the Gulf, Stevens concedes. But larger companies, and

professionals who need to drive a lot—engineers, builders and developers, for

instance—will gravitate to the highway. Small office outposts already have

sprouted along Naples interchanges, Stevens says, and more are likely. Easy

accessibility also attracts health-care operations—witness the Cleveland Clinic

Florida’s location at I-75’s Pine Ridge Road exit.

Beyond its appeal as a transportation corridor, tremendous

residential growth east of the interstate has driven the road’s increasing

importance to business, say Randal L. Mercer, managing broker/partner, and

Robert D. Greig, associate for retail/business at CB Richard Ellis, a

commercial real estate business in Fort Myers. “This is the only remaining

corridor where you can buy large tracts of land and develop communities,” says

Mercer. “It gets back to rooftops, services and demand.” Burgeoning residential

developments close to I-75 in Lee County—like Fiddlesticks, Sun City and

Gateway—are driving demand for business goods and services.

Currently the emphasis is on retail, as big outfits such as

Publix, Albertson’s, Target and Wal-Mart follow population east. They will soon

be joined by shippers building freight depots and warehouses, especially near

the growing airport-university hub, Mercer and Greig predict. Though Southwest

Florida would never make sense as a major distribution point because it’s at a

geographical dead end, it would function well as a regional distribution point

for the five counties nearest the airport. The Jetport Commerce Center at I-75

and Daniels Parkway, developed a decade ago, and the western portion of Lehigh

Acres are two likely growth spots, given their low cost compared to similar

property in Collier, Mercer says.

What’s more, he adds, nearby FGCU will bring research parks,

and students who graduate and become long-term residents. “The big drivers in

this market will be the airport and the university,” says Mercer. “All you have

to do is look anywhere in Florida, and anywhere you see a state university, you

see a tremendous amount of energy and long-term spinoff.”

Though the region has a limited industrial base, office

buildings on or near the interstate could be a logical next step in Lee,

especially for companies hiring hundreds rather than dozens of workers, Mercer

notes. “If somebody had to employ 300 or 400 people, it would be very hard to

find them without stealing them from somebody else and getting into wage

competition,” he says. Better transportation corridors would help increase the

labor pool in an area with a perennial workforce shortage.

But the shift eastward has boosted land prices. Some parcels

along the interstate have doubled in cost in the past five years, according to

Mercer, although he says he’s not worried about a bubble. “The big nationals

tend to do their market research, and they have a formula they stick to and

won’t pay too much,” he says. For many smaller tenants, locating in a shopping

center with a Publix or other major retailer represents a slam-dunk

opportunity. “Those anchors create a hotbed of activity that local tenants feed

off,” he says. “At the Publix anchors, you’ll always see the florist and the

drugstore and the pizza place.” Many of those spaces are leased long before the

centers open.

If it’s a golden vision of the future these real estate pros

see, it’s also a crowded one. For those who complain about traffic now, things

are likely to get worse. There’s intense competition throughout the state and

nation for highway funding. When money does become available, it can take years

to complete public hearings and environmental and engineering studies.

“Right now we’re seeing an annual average of upwards of

70,000 trips a day, and it can get just crazy with traffic in the afternoons,”

says Debbie Tower, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Transportation

regional office in Fort Myers. “By 2030 we might see upwards of 120,000 per day

annual average daily traffic.”

Although there are no quick fixes, the state and federal

governments have sped up plans to widen the interstate, thanks to funds from

Gov. Jeb Bush’s Mobility 2000 program. The section of I-75 in Lee and Collier

is slated to increase to six lanes by 2009 and 10 lanes by 2030, though some

businessmen, backed by the influential Southwest Florida Transportation

Initiative, are pushing Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, to speed up funding and

widening.

Until then, interim measures will have to suffice, involving

relatively quick, inexpensive improvements like tweaking traffic signals or

lengthening or widening entrances and exits to the interstate from feeder

roads. Such changes will create more “storage,” in traffic engineers’ parlance,

theoretically avoiding the frustrating bottlenecks that frequently occur during

rush hour at high season.

The DOT is focusing on the interchanges at Corkscrew and

Alico roads and Daniels Parkway, where tremendous growth in traffic is

anticipated, but engineers may also address other interchanges. The DOT also

plans to set up a camera system along the interstate called an Intelligent

Transportation System that will alert drivers to problems ahead. One, in fact,

is being installed in the bridge widening project currently in progress over

the Peace River in Charlotte County. But in other places, like Orlando, the

system has flopped, given that, as with Southwest Florida, few alternative

routes exist even when motorists are alerted that problems lie ahead.

Part of the problem, Tower points out, is that the

interstate was never intended to be a road for commuters or local business; it

was designed as a high-speed, limited-access highway connecting the states. The

ambitious federal road system got its start under President Dwight D.

Eisenhower in 1956 during the Cold War era for the same reason the first

transcontinental railroad received funding during the Civil War: as a defense

measure to move troops and weapons. Since the last section of I-75 was completed

in Southwest Florida in 1986, funneling visitors, tourists and trade south (and

in its early years sparking construction of 35 major projects in Charlotte, Lee

and Collier counties that included 56,000 houses, 15 million square feet of

office and retail space and more than 9 million square feet of industrial

parks), it has become much more than a high-speed land connection between

states. Because of a lack of developable land, labor and north-south routes in

Collier and Lee, it will have to remain more than a long-haul road here.

As bad as traffic may be here now, most agree, it’s far

worse in many other places. Doubters need only make the short drive over to