Airport Road Is Widening to Six Lanes. Turning Out of Pelican Marsh Won't Get Easier.
October 1, 2026
October 1, 2026
Pull up to the Airport-Pulling Road gate at Pelican Marsh this week and you'll see the same four-lane stretch that's been there for years: no bike lane, a narrow shoulder, and a left turn out onto Airport that depends entirely on a gap in oncoming traffic. Collier County has spent the better part of three years designing a fix for that road. The fix adds two lanes, a planted median, sidewalks on both sides, and dedicated bike lanes. It does not, by design, make that left turn any easier. In some cases, it removes it.
That's the part of this project that hasn't made it into the neighborhood chatter yet, and it's worth understanding before the equipment shows up at your gate.
The Airport Road Widening Project covers the stretch between Vanderbilt Beach Road and Immokalee Road, which is the exact segment where Pelican Marsh's secondary entrance sits. Collier County's Transportation Management Services Department has been walking this project through public design phases since a 30 percent design meeting in December 2023, followed by a 60 percent design meeting on March 27, 2025 at North Collier Regional Park. Design work was expected to wrap by the end of 2025.
The finished cross-section, according to the county's own project materials, turns today's four-lane road into a six-lane divided urban arterial: 11-foot travel lanes, a raised median running 22 to 29 feet wide, curb and gutter on both sides, a 10-foot sidewalk on the west side, a 6-foot sidewalk on the east side, and on-street bike lanes the entire length. A new stormwater drainage system and street lighting come with it, and once construction wraps, the county has said it will sync the traffic signals along the corridor through its Traffic Control System.
Construction cost was pegged at $37.3 million as of the March 2025 estimate, drawn from a mix of sources: the county's one-cent infrastructure sales surtax that voters approved in 2018, an FDOT County Incentive Grant Program award, road impact fees, and gas tax revenue. A separate design contract, worth $1.9 million, was split roughly evenly between FDOT grant funding and the county's own match.
The county's design documents describe the median change as an access-management measure, meant to reduce vehicle conflict points and cut down on severe angle-type crashes by limiting how many places drivers can cross all lanes at once. In practice, that means some full left turns in and out of driveways and neighborhood entrances along this stretch go away, replaced by right-in, right-out access and a designated U-turn point further down the road.
Residents along the corridor have already said as much in public comment. Homeowners in Victoria Park and Crescent Lake Estates, two neighborhoods that sit on this same segment of Airport-Pulling Road, raised the issue directly at a county information session, telling WINK News they would lose the ability to turn left in and out of their own developments once the median goes in. One Crescent Lake Estates resident put it plainly: "I'm not real happy about losing my left turn access." Not every reaction ran the same direction. A Naples driver who uses the corridor regularly told the same reporter he welcomed the change, since backups trying to turn right onto Immokalee Road from Airport Road have been a daily headache.
The county's written response to public comment confirmed the tradeoff is intentional. The design is meant to reduce how often drivers cross multiple lanes of oncoming traffic, and that requirement doesn't stop at the boundary of any one neighborhood. Pelican Marsh's Airport-Pulling Road entrance sits inside the same design limits as Victoria Park and Crescent Lake Estates. The county's public materials don't spell out the exact turning movements at the Pelican Marsh Boulevard intersection specifically, but the same access-management logic governs the entire corridor, which means residents here should expect a similar kind of tradeoff at their own gate rather than an exception carved out for it.
The county's own schedule has moved a few times, which is normal for a project this size. An early estimate floated construction starting "as early as fall of 2026." A later document, published after the 60 percent design meeting, sharpened that to construction anticipated to start in June 2026, with a build window running up to two years.
If the county held to that more recent schedule, this corridor is already inside an active construction window as of this fall, with work likely to continue into 2028. That means residents using the Airport-Pulling Road gate should expect to see this shift from planning documents to orange barrels and lane shifts sometime around now, not as a distant future item.
This isn't an isolated project on the county's books. Collier County has a running list of corridor widenings moving through design and construction at the same time, including the Vanderbilt Beach Road Extension in Golden Gate Estates, which opened its first seven-mile phase in June 2026 after a $153 million build, and a planned diverging diamond interchange at I-75 and Immokalee Road expected to start construction in early 2027. Airport-Pulling Road's widening sits in the middle of that broader push, not off to the side of it.
A few things worth separating out, since they get conflated easily in neighborhood conversation:
None of this shows up as an emergency. It's a standard tradeoff that comes with any corridor upgrade of this size, and Collier County has been transparent about the access-management reasoning behind it since the first design meeting. But it's the kind of detail that's easy to miss between a rendering shared at a public meeting and the actual barrels showing up at your gate, and it's worth knowing before you're the one stuck trying to find the U-turn.
If you're weighing what a changing commute means for how you use this corner of North Naples day to day, or you just want someone who tracks these projects at the neighborhood level rather than the countywide press release level, Cheena Chandra is happy to talk through what it looks like on the ground in Pelican Marsh right now.
Cheena is focused on integrity, her customers' needs, and using technology and social media in innovative ways. She goes to great lengths for her customers and is committed to making the home buying and selling experience a seamless one. As a result, her customers have been amazing referrals for new business.