The Florida-Alabama Transportation Planning Organization voted unanimously to accept the Florida Department of Transportation's FY2027-2031 Tentative Work Program at its February 11, 2026 meeting at the Bayview Community Center in Pensacola. The work program locks in funding and project phasing for the region's major transportation investments over the next five years, including the I-10 widening project that has become the most consequential infrastructure decision in the metro area.
FDOT District Three planning staff presented the full work program to the TPO board. Carla Hodges of FDOT highlighted the Strategic Intermodal System priorities for the region: the I-10 widening to six lanes, interchange improvements at State Road 99, and what Hodges described as "extensive ITS fiber deployment" across both Escambia and Santa Rosa counties. ITS, Intelligent Transportation Systems, fiber forms the backbone of real-time traffic signal coordination, incident detection, and emergency management communication that modern urban corridors require.
The SR 99 interchange improvement is separate from the I-10 widening but closely related. SR 99, Beulah Road, is the primary north-south arterial serving the Beulah community, Navy Federal Credit Union's campus, and the residential growth west of Pensacola that has been among the fastest-growing parts of Escambia County over the past decade. The interchange at I-10 and SR 99 carries daily volume well above its design capacity. Reconstruction is a prerequisite for the area's continued growth absorbing without creating gridlock on both the interstate and the surface street network feeding it.
Non-SIS priorities presented at the meeting included the Fairfield Drive project, a lighting project on SR 727/SR 295 between North 65th Avenue and West Highland Drive, funded at $25,000 in FY2025-2026, and various transportation alternatives projects that cover pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure upgrades.
The meeting also featured a presentation from Curtis McBride of Myovision, a traffic technology company with early deployments in Escambia County. McBride described applications currently in use nationally, continuous safety analytics using video-based detection and connected vehicle alerts communicating pedestrian and cyclist presence directly to in-vehicle dashboards. The Pensacola metro has been a test bed for some of these technologies through earlier ECRC initiatives, and the presentation signaled continued interest in deploying them at scale.
The FL-AL TPO's study area covers the Pensacola urbanized area and adjacent portions of Escambia County, Santa Rosa County, and Baldwin County, Alabama. The next TPO meeting is May 13, 2026, at 9 a.m. at the Bayview Community Center. Advisory committee meetings, the Technical Coordinating Committee at 10 a.m. and Citizens' Advisory Committee at 1:30 p.m., take place the day before on May 12.