By adding a pedestrian-only connector, Palm Beach Gardens opens space for additional lane on Kyoto Gardens Drive by FPL office building.
Pile-driven columns in place in October to support a pedestrian bridge on the south side of Kyoto Gardens Drive next to the FPL building in Palm Beach Gardens. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
Palm Beach Gardens officials say they have found a solution to a potential traffic bottleneck while avoiding the hefty cost of rebuilding a bridge.
After years of construction along Kyoto Gardens Drive next to the NextEra Energy/Florida Power & Light office building, the road is ripped up again.
But this time, city officials say, they are doing less to provide more.
Rather than undertake the costly rebuild of the five-lane bridge to ease congestion anticipated from the second, 1,000-employee FPL office building, the city found a way to add a sixth lane on the bridge by eliminating the sidewalk and building a stand-alone pedestrian bridge.
“Through creative thinking from our Engineer Department and our city engineer there was a way to take the incoming traffic coming south on Military Trail, increase the turn lanes from one to two and be able to do that with the existing bridge,” City Manager Ron Ferris said in his Aug. 7 report to the City Council (50-minute mark).
“So it saved millions of dollars to be able to do this,” he said. “That’s not unusual for our engineering team.”
The result will be a second westbound left-turn lane to southbound Military Trail creating four westbound lanes to help ease the ride home for FPL employees heading south on Military Trail or west to a northbound Interstate 95 entrance ramp.
It also avoids extending the bridge to the south, the only option because the north side went up nearly 20 years ago after negotiations with neighbors and the addition of a wall to reduce noise.
Ferris estimated construction would take three to four months.
City plans for Kyoto Gardens Drive presented to the City Council on Aug. 7. (Illustration: Palm Beach Gardens)
$4.8 million under contract
The city borrowed $8 million in 2023 to rebuild the bridge, part of a $20 million loan that helped pay for the renovation of the Burns Road Community Center.
The city now budgets $7 million for the bridge project. A budget document provided by the city shows that $1.8 million of that amount has not been allocated.
In 2023, FPL submitted a check for nearly $1 million toward the project as part of its mobility fee payment for its second building, under construction next to the first building, which opened in 2022.
FPL has the right to build a third building and the campus has approval for nearly 1 million square feet of development, enough to handle 4,000 workers.
By adding a pedestrian bridge over the property’s drainage lake rather than extending the existing bridge, city records provided to Stet News in response to a public records request show, contracts for the project add up to $4.8 million. The amount includes $747,000 for the prefabricated, 390-foot-long pedestrian bridge.
The work will result in four westbound lanes on Kyoto Gardens: two dedicated left-turn lanes, one left-turn or straight lane and one right-turn only. The straight lane takes motorists to a northbound Interstate 95 entrance ramp.
While the bridge will retain its existing two eastbound lanes, the work also calls for adding a second left-turn lane on southbound Military Trail to go east on Kyoto Gardens Drive.
Crews are also adding a new entryway into the FPL campus and a new U-turn option and burying new stormwater pipes along Military Trail.
Traffic backs up in September awaiting the left turn onto southbound Military Trail from Kyoto Gardens Drive. Construction plans call for three left-turn lanes. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
A road often under construction
Kyoto Gardens crosses property once owned by the late insurance magnate, John D. MacArthur, and sold by his foundation to developer Dan Catalfumo in 1999.
To get the rights to turn the vacant 86 acres and another nearby tract into a commercial center, Catalfumo partnered with the city to build Kyoto Gardens Drive and RCA Center Drive in 2007. Building the roads, which included the rail crossing at Alternate A1A, cost about $5.6 million. The city kicked in about 40% because it wanted Kyoto to be four lanes instead of two.
But the economy collapsed and Catalfumo never built planned hotels, office buildings and stores on the huge site just west of The Gardens Mall. He lost the land to lenders.
Florida Power & Light’s Palm Beach Gardens building lights up in 2024. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
FPL paid $24 million in 2011 for all but 4.2 acres, which it bought in 2018 for $4.9 million.
In July 2013, the city gave the Juno Beach-based power company the right to build nearly 1 million square feet of office space on the site. Its second building still leaves nearly 500,000 square feet for future development.
Since then, Kyoto Gardens Drive has been in an almost constant state of change, with FPL ripping out oak trees in 2021 to move RCA Center Drive 85 yards west and to widen the sidewalk. Moving the road away from the railroad crossing cleared the way for a stoplight at RCA Center Drive and Kyoto if traffic warrants it.
In 2022, a water main straddled the road for weeks, also prompted by the demands of the new FPL campus. The line, which was bored under the Florida East Coast Railway tracks and Alternate A1A, replaced an existing water main that crossed FPL’s site and needed a new tie-in to meet the office buildings’ hefty water needs, particularly for fire protection.
Last year, crews were at it again, building an 8-foot-wide sidewalk and 5-foot-wide bike lane for a half-mile on the north side of Kyoto Gardens. The federal government put up $1.5 million for the work with the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization committing $129,000 in state money aimed at local transportation alternative projects.
A backhoe in locked down in September on the Kyoto Gardens bridge. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
Two lanes of the five-lane Kyoto Gardens bridge are closed on Nov. 10 on the approach to the entrance to the NextEra Energy office building. The work will expand the bridge to six lanes. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
The entrance off Kyoto Gardens Drive to the NextEra Energy/Florida Power & Light office building in December 2024. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
Adding a lane to Military Trail will allow for a southbound double left-turn lane onto Kyoto Gardens Drive. (Photo: Joel Engelhardt/Stet)
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
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