ORANGE BEACH, AL – Say you’re leaving your Bluewater condo after a week of enjoying beautiful, white beaches and surf.

Packed up and loaded, you head east to Alabama 161 to make a left turn north to connect to Canal Road to connect to the Foley Beach Express Bridge.

Under a plan proposed by the Alabama Department of Transportation and designed by Gonzalez-Strength and Associates and Skipper Consulting, you won’t be able to make that turn.

And planners and government officials say that’s not a bad thing.

Instead of making that turn traffic will continue on to a new traffic signal at entrance to the Cotton Bayou boat launch.

From there traffic wanting to head north will queue in two turn lanes, make U-turns back to Alabama 161 and flow through that intersection north without stopping.

“The whole point is to cut down the number of phases,” Orange Beach Director of Community Development Kit Alexander said. “This is a pinch point, this what causes our level of service to be so bad.

“It’s not so much the size of the road it’s the number of green light red light cycles or phases that you have to go through to complete a cycle.”

With this improvement, Alexander said, the light at the intersection of Alabama 182, beach road, and Alabama 161 – the city’s most important intersection – will just have three phases.

“This will be constantly flowing,” Alexander said of the traffic heading north on Alabama 161 in the new configuration. “They intentionally added two lanes here so they could keep this moving at all times. Then they isolated a turn for the boat launch. And they also isolated a lane for the beach.”

Eastbound traffic queuing up at the boat launch entrance will trigger the light when it reaches a certain volume. Westbound traffic will stop and the U-turning traffic will flow unto Alabama 161 unimpeded.

When leaving Cotton Bayou Beach Access, motorists will proceed east to a U-turn signal at St. Thomas Catholic Church.

About a dozen staffers from ALDOT were on hand March 29 for a presentation on the plan for improving safety, flow and beautification on beach road.

It currently includes adding 16 places where traffic signals will be U-turns to safely head back in the other direction to your destination. Each signal will also be a crosswalk for pedestrians.

“Our concerns for this area are the safety of the traveling public and the pedestrians, traffic speed, and importantly the pedestrian and bicycle accessibility,” ALDOT Southwest Engineeer Vince Calametti said. “The capacity – we all know we have capacity issues out there.”

Calametti cited the 227 accidents on Alabama 182 from 2012-14 resulting in 49 injuries and six deaths. There were eight pedestrian accidents during the same period resulting in two deaths.

“On the average 72 percent of the crashes involved left turns,” he said. “Forty-seven percent are related to left turns on side streets, 39 percent on the main street.”

He also pointed out that currently there are 520 conflict points on beach road and the new U-turn system will reduce that by 35 percent. At Palm Point Center the system, officials said, will reduce conflict points from 39 to just three.

The new signals will work in concert with each other, Alexander said.

“All of the lights will all be communicating and they’ll have timed windows where they can all changed in synch,” she said. “If you come up here you’ll have to wait until that synched time so that when all this happens it happens in the most efficient flowing manner. They’ll all be synched and communicating with each other.”