Walk south along Ocean Boulevard after dinner and you already know the rhythm without thinking about it: slow down near Toscana, glance twice at Coronado Ocean Club, wait for a gap before Ambassadors East. Highland Beach's stretch of A1A has never had traffic signals, and residents have built their own private map of where to cross and when. That map is about to get an update.
In August, the town commission approved a $283,920 contract with Lux Solar Inc. to install in-ground LED lighting at eight mid-block pedestrian crossings along Ocean Boulevard, part of a $375,000 state-funded safety project that also repaves and regrades sections of the shared-use path beside the road. The lights will sit flush in the pavement, connected to the same push buttons already standing at some intersections, and will flash bi-directionally to warn drivers a pedestrian is in the crosswalk.
That is the headline. The more useful story is why these eight spots, why now, and what it means for the walk you already take.
This isn't a new idea. It's the last piece of an old one.
Highland Beach spent more than a year and $8.3 million rebuilding A1A, a project town officials described as substantially complete back in January. Crews milled and resurfaced the roadway, widened it in both directions to add five-foot bike lanes, and reworked the swales for better drainage. By the start of this year, the barrels were gone and the road had its bright green bike markings.
One item stayed unfinished: the lighted crosswalk signals. Getting them built depended on a state appropriation that state Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman had requested, and whether it survived the legislative session was never guaranteed. It came through, and now the piece that was always meant to complete the overhaul is finally moving. If you have been wondering for the better part of a year why the crossings still looked the way they did before the repaving started, that's the reason. The town wasn't waiting on planning. It was waiting on Tallahassee.
The locations aren't spread evenly, and that's the point.
The eight sites came out of a Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization road safety audit of the corridor, and they read less like a grid and more like a diagnosis. Moving north to south:
- Grand Court, milepost 5.017
- Near Regency Highland, milepost 5.89
- Near Toscana Towers, milepost 6.15
- At the Highland Beach Club, milepost 6.293
- At Coronado Ocean Club, milepost 6.507
- Near Ambassadors East, milepost 6.577
- Near Monterey House, milepost 6.817
- Near Delray Sands Resort, milepost 7.137
Notice the gap between Grand Court and Regency Highland, nearly a mile with no marked mid-block crossing, against a run of four crossings packed into under half a mile, from Toscana Towers through Ambassadors East. That cluster sits in the same general section of road where the resurfacing project changed elevation and drainage enough to cause standing water and, according to the town's own funding request, force pedestrians into the travel lane in places. The lights aren't being added because someone liked the idea of lights. They're being added where the repaving created a new problem the original project didn't fully solve.
What actually changes for your walk
The work folds into the broader safety project, so expect it to look and feel like the tail end of last year's construction rather than a fresh disruption: some milling, some repaving of the path itself, flaggers at points where the sidewalk narrows. The town has said the project must be finished within six months of the formal notice to proceed, though that notice hadn't been issued as of the most recent public update, so a firm start date isn't locked in yet.
Two practical notes worth keeping in mind if you walk or bike this stretch regularly:
The lights use your existing push buttons. If you already use the pedestrian signal at Linton or one of the marked intersections, the new mid-block crossings will work the same way. There's no new app, no new system to learn, just more places where pressing a button gets you a flashing warning to drivers.
The path work addresses the flooding, not just the crossings. If you've had to step into the bike lane or the road itself after a hard rain near the cluster of buildings between the Highland Beach Club and Ambassadors East, that's the specific problem this phase is meant to fix. The regrading is aimed at getting water off the path rather than pooling against the new road elevation.
Why this matters more than it looks like it should
Highland Beach is a town of roughly 4,150 year-round residents that swells past 8,000 in winter, and it is nearly built out end to end. There isn't a lot of room here for big projects. What there is, instead, is a slow, patient correction of the small things: repave the road, then fix what the repaving disturbed, then finish the crossing signals that depended on money from somewhere else entirely. It's not a dramatic story, but it's an honest one about how a small coastal town actually gets things done, in sequence, over years, funded a piece at a time.
For anyone who already treats A1A as the spine of daily life here, whether that means a sunrise walk with the dog, an evening ride to watch the light change over the Intracoastal, or the short trip to the library for one of its film nights, this is worth knowing before the flagger shows up outside your building. The map you've built in your head for crossing safely is about to get eight new landmarks. It's a small thing. It's also the kind of small thing that tells you the town is still paying attention to a project most people assumed was finished back in January.
If you want to keep an eye on the construction schedule as the notice to proceed gets issued, Boca Daily News has been the most consistent source tracking the project's progress and covered the prior phase's completion in January.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home along this stretch of A1A, or you're simply curious how a project like this affects a specific building or block, Laura Gallagher and Terri Berman know this corridor block by block and are always happy to talk it through.
