Two road projects aim to improve southern Osceola County traffic

Two major road projects now in the works could ease traffic in southern Osceola County and make life easier for residents in fast-growing St. Cloud.

Jesus Hernandez Jr. can’t wait as clogged roads now seem to impact so much of his family’s life.

“Everything is scheduled around traffic,” said Hernandez, who has lived in St. Cloud for more than 20 years. “Sitting in traffic makes you drive a little bit more impatiently, and I think that’s why we’re seeing more accidents too.”

The Central Florida Expressway Authority is planning to build one of the projects, a 15-to-20 mile expressway called the Northeast Connector connecting Florida's Turnpike to U.S. Highway 192. The goal is to eventually connect that expressway to two other planned roads, State Road 534 and the proposed Southport Connector Expressway, to create a southern beltway in Osceola.

Last month the agency presented its preferred alignment for $2.1 billion Northeast Connector to the public for the first time, showing a highway that dodges around planned development with bridges across major local roads and wetlands.

Meanwhile, Osceola County is working to widen Canoe Creek Road, looking to make more than four miles of the current two-lane road into a four-lane divided throughway. That project will cost more than $156 million.

The expressway authority also is considering an interchange connecting Canoe Creek Road to the Northeast Connector, offering St. Cloud residents their first direct east-west highway connection.

St. Cloud residents have long requested road improvements and better highway access as the city has ballooned in population to its current 58,900 and is projected to keep growing in coming decades.

Canoe Creek Road is a county-owned thoroughfare currently used by roughly 13,500 vehicles per day, a tally that could jump to 39,000 vehicles a day by 2045, officials said.

It serves as St. Cloud’s main road to many residential developments, and thousands more homes are planned for the area.

Ryan Stanyon, who lives on Canoe Creek Road, said when the road is at its busiest, it sometimes takes him about 15 minutes to pull out of his driveway. So he understands the need for improvement, but he is also worried.

He attended the county’s public hearing on the project last week and thinks his property may be needed for the widening, which includes plans for a sidewalk and shared-use path.

He and his wife live with their 3-year-old son in the house purchased in 2017.

“Eventually, it’s not going to be my home,” Stanyon said. “I’ll be driving where I used to sit and eat dinner.”

He is looking at other homes in the area, but prices have shot up since he purchased nearly a decade ago and, because the county has not made a decision yet, he now feels like he is “living in limbo.”

“I won’t be able to drive by when my son’s older and be like ‘hey you were born there’,” Stanyon said. “It’s an unsettling state of limbo. I mean this is where you eat, sleep, raise a child and that’s your house. I’d rather they just make the decision this week, so it’s just over and done with.”

The project is set to begin construction in 2029 subject to funding availability. Any determinations concerning the need for eminent domain, a lengthy legal process that allows local governments to take private property for public use and pay its owners, won’t be made until late 2026, spokesperson Tyler Winik said in an email.

Hernandez, his wife and their young child live in the Canoe Creek Woods neighborhood off of Canoe Creek Road. Once, it took his wife an hour to drive one mile on the congested road, he said.

Widening the road is a step in the right direction, he said, but the true improvement to traffic will come with direct access to highways, like the Northeast Connector and other planned expressways.

“Barely anyone works in St. Cloud, and everyone goes to Orlando or Kissimmee and what happens is it creates a choke point at entrances to highways,” Hernandez said. “It’ll only help us out, if there’s more than one way to get on [the highway] because if you …only put one way to get on, you’re going to create a bottleneck - which is what we’re already experiencing.”

The Northeast Connector will be a roughly 19-mile, four-lane divided highway with bridges crossing over local roads and four proposed interchanges, the toll road agency said during its presentation last month.

The proposed alignment will impact roughly 71 acres in the Lake X Conservation Area, more than 1,000 acres of state-owned land made up primarily of wetlands, but bridges are planned to minimize the impact. The alignment selected has the least impact to current and proposed development in the fast-growing area and “manageable environmental impacts,” the agency said.

Canoe Creek Road will be widened in two segments, the first an over 4-mile stretch from Deer Run Road to 192, and the second from the future Southport Connector Expressway to Deer Run Road. The second segment, which was presented to the public for a public hearing last week, will be brought before the board for a vote later this summer. However no funds have yet been allocated for that portion, Winik said.

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This story was originally published May 10, 2026 at 7:13 AM.