Daytime lane closures are coming back to the Stan Gober bridge at Goodland within a fortnight, this time for work under the deck, and the flaggers are the part drivers will feel

Drivers who use San Marco Road to get on and off the east side of Marco Island should expect single lane traffic on the Stan Gober Memorial Bridge again within the next one to two weeks, and through the rest of the summer.

Marco Island Fire Rescue announced the schedule, and WINK News reported it on Thursday. The new phase is repair work beneath the bridge deck and along its supporting beams, which needs a specialised inspection truck with a man basket sitting in the travel lanes. That puts the closures in daylight hours and puts flaggers, rather than traffic signals, in charge of who moves. Traffic drops from two lanes to one in short sections.

The distinction is worth a moment. When Collier County mobilised the project in March, its own release described a concrete barrier wall closing the westbound lane and a one lane road with traffic signals at each end letting traffic through one direction at a time, with the contractor adjusting signal timing through the project to hold delays down. A flagged section behaves differently. There is no cycle to estimate, so the sensible assumption for the next several weeks is a variable daytime delay rather than a predictable one. Neither the county nor Marco Island Fire Rescue has published a document reconciling the two configurations, and this brief does not treat either as replacing the other.

Goodland has no way around it. The bridge is the road in and out, so the delay is absorbed rather than avoided. For traffic with no destination on that side, the county's March advice still stands: take an alternate route, which in practice means the S.S. Jolley Bridge on the west side of the island.

Work is going on under the bridge at the same time. Crews are placing bank and shore riprap around select piers to address scour, working from barges with heavy equipment and with divers inspecting daily. Boaters have been asked to keep a safe distance and to hold speeds down so wakes do not shift the equipment. The staging area at the west end of the bridge is closed to the public while the project runs.

The posted speed limit through the zone is 35 mph and speeding fines are doubled.

On timing, the two accounts do not line up neatly. The county said in March that all bridge deck work requiring lane closures was anticipated to be complete by this summer and that the rehabilitation as a whole would finish next spring. The announcement this week has the under deck repairs running through the summer and the project finishing in spring 2027. What both agree on is that closures on this bridge are a condition of the season rather than a one off, and that the job has months left.

Collier County publishes the Transportation Engineering Division as the contact for the project, at TECM@collier.gov or (239) 252-8192.