NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla. (WINK)\u2014A major road project on U.S. 41 in Lee County is dragging on longer than expected, and workers along the route say it’s becoming dangerous.<\/p>\n
The Florida Department of Transportation says the project is about 95% complete. But people who use the road every day say it doesn’t feel that way.<\/p>\n
“They said they were going to be done months ago\u2014so who knows,” said Arik Leaders, a junior artist at Loyal 2 The Coil Tattoos & Piercings.<\/p>\n
For more than a year, construction crews have been working to add new traffic signals, lighting and pedestrian beacons. But for the people living and working along U.S. 41, the day-to-day reality looks very different.<\/p>\n
“There’s always tons of construction, the trucks, and they’re always parked up on side of the road and stuff, because there’s not much road space,” Leaders said.<\/p>\n
Business owners say the constant changes from cones to closed lanes are confusing drivers and making simple turns risky.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“All the trucks are everywhere, blocking everything,” Leaders said.<\/p>\n
And it’s not just drivers at risk. One business owner along U.S. 41 said pedestrians are also in danger.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I’ve had a couple people that have had close calls with being hit, pretty bad,” the business owner said. “Their people are just not paying attention.”<\/p>\n
Some say they’ve seen the consequences firsthand.<\/p>\n
“We have definitely been involved in a lot of situations where people have been hurt really bad and some resulting in death, more than I’d like to admit, but quite a few,” the business owner said.<\/p>\n
FDOT says the project will be complete in spring 2026, according to a press release from Friday. WINK News reached out to FDOT for additional comment but did not receive a response.<\/p>\n
WINK News will continue to push for answers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NORTH FORT MYERS, Fla. (WINK)\u2014A major road project on U.S. 41 in Lee County is dragging on longer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":260036,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210,3837,115],"class_list":["post-260035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news","tag-collaborator_gen_stories","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/260036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}