Why the Fix at Harbour Drive and Crayton Road Keeps Getting Pushed Back
"Roundabouts reduce mistakes, and when those rare mistakes do happen, the consequences are far less dramatic and permanent. Instead of tragedy, we have survivable events."
Anthony Renda said that to the Naples City Council on March 4, 2026. He sits on the board of Naples Velo, the area's largest cycling club, and he was there for a vote that had been eight years in the making: whether to finally replace the aging traffic signal at Harbour Drive and Crayton Road with a roundabout. Council voted unanimously in favor.
If you live in the Moorings, Park Shore, or Coquina Sands, you already know this corner even if you have never thought about it by name. It sits on the route almost everyone in the neighborhood ends up using, on foot, on a bike, or behind the wheel. The vote to fix it was unanimous. What happens next has turned out to be a different story, and the reason it keeps slipping says something worth knowing about how projects like this actually move, even after everyone agrees.
Gulf Shore Boulevard North does not run straight through this stretch of coastline. It breaks at Doctors Pass, the inlet that connects Moorings Bay to the Gulf, right past Harbour Drive. Anyone walking or riding north from the Moorings toward Park Shore Drive and Venetian Village has to detour east on Harbour Drive to Crayton Road, cross the bridge, and rejoin Gulf Shore Boulevard further up. That detour runs directly through the intersection at Harbour and Crayton.
The signal there is a span-wire assembly, the older style with wires strung across the intersection rather than mounted on fixed arms. According to the city's own project page, it no longer meets Florida Department of Transportation standards for signalized intersections in a coastal zone, and FDOT has been recommending a fix here for years. In June 2026, the city installed new 20-foot green thermoplastic bike lane panels at four intersections in this corridor, including Harbour and Crayton, meant to sharpen driver awareness while the bigger question of what replaces the signal itself stayed unresolved.
The timeline is longer than most people crossing this intersection would guess.
Two completed designs, shelved. Nearly $290,000 spent before a shovel touched the ground. That is the cost of eight years of the city changing its mind about which kind of intersection is safer.
The crash that reopened the debate happened on the evening of November 8, 2024. Barry and Eileen Smith had stepped into the marked crosswalk, walking eastbound, when a driver making a green-light turn from Harbour Drive onto Crayton Road struck them. Eileen Smith, 69, died. Barry Smith, 75, survived.
In the months after, the Moorings Property Owners Association surveyed its members directly. The survey went out to more than 2,000 MPOA residents and drew 274 responses, with over 70 percent favoring the roundabout. That is roughly one in eight residents formally weighing in, and it was enough. Nat Smith, director of the Naples Pathways Coalition, told council at the time that members had "heard overwhelmingly from the residents in the neighborhood that had a neighbor killed."
It is worth sitting with what that sequence actually shows. The city had already built and nearly bid out a signal replacement. It took a documented death and a response from a small fraction of one homeowners association to unwind that decision and restart the roundabout design from where it had been left in 2018.
Here is the part that most coverage of the unanimous March vote missed. A unanimous council vote sounds like the end of the story. It was not.
By April 22, 2026, the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums reported that the project had run into a new snag: "additional design modifications requested by property owners adjacent to the roundabout" had stalled the final plans. City Engineer Alison Bickett had originally expected the construction contract to reach council in June, in time to start work over the summer. Instead, the contract slipped toward a mid-August 2026 target, the most recent point at which this has been publicly reported.
This is the mechanism worth understanding if you live nearby. A full council consensus, a documented fatality, and a majority-supported neighborhood survey were not enough on their own to guarantee a fast finish. The intersection touches a small number of adjacent parcels, and the owners of those parcels still have real input into the roundabout's final footprint and landscaping. That input, not funding or political will, is what has pushed the timeline from summer into fall.
The $1.5 million projected cost, meanwhile, is coming from the city's one-cent sales tax rather than a direct assessment on nearby properties, according to City Manager Gary Young's comments to council in March. And once construction does begin, residents should expect it to take a while. Bickett has projected a ten-month build, a length one member of the public called "shocking and frightening" at the March meeting. Bickett's response was candid: the city would not have a firmer picture until a contractor was actually under contract.
As of this writing, the mid-August council date has not yet produced a public update. If the contract clears that meeting, construction could begin before the end of the year, which would put the ten-month build finishing sometime in mid-2027, after the goal Bickett stated of having it done "prior to the next season" slips by at least a few months.
Until then, the intersection functions exactly as it has for years. Same span-wire signal, same crosswalk. The only physical change so far is the green bike lane striping installed this past June, a visibility measure layered onto an intersection design that predates it by nearly a decade.
If you want to follow this past what is written here, the city's project page takes public comment directly, and the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums has covered the story in detail through its newsletter as it has moved, and stalled, and moved again. For a corner this many people in the Moorings, Park Shore, and Coquina Sands cross without a second thought, it is a longer story than the crosswalk paint suggests.
Whether you are walking to Venetian Village, riding the loop up Gulf Shore Boulevard, or simply crossing Crayton Road on the way home, the details of a project like this shape daily life in ways that rarely make it into a neighborhood's public image. White Horse Group pays attention to that kind of detail because it is part of knowing a place well enough to represent it. If you are curious what else is shifting in the neighborhoods we work in, or you are ready to talk about property here, we would be glad to start the conversation. Begin Your Bespoke Experience.
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