Two travel lanes are being added to State Road 16 between International Golf Parkway and a point just past County Road 2209, and this week the traffic moves.

The county says eastbound drivers shift onto the newly built lanes beginning around Oct. 1, along a stretch it puts at approximately a quarter of a mile, between the AutoZone driveway and the 7-Eleven.

The part to know before Thursday afternoon is the turn. A driver coming off International Golf Parkway and turning right onto SR 16 will have to stop first. Westbound traffic is moving into the right lane, so a right on red that used to be a roll is now a stop, and the county says that requirement stays in place after the widening is finished.

Access to the AutoZone and the 7-Eleven does not change. Variable message boards and temporary signs go up to mark the new pattern.

What happens to the old lanes

Once traffic is on the new pavement, the contractor starts tearing up the two existing lanes of SR 16. Those two, rebuilt, become the eastbound lanes when the job is done.

That is the sequence that makes this a shift rather than an opening. Nothing gains capacity on Thursday. The same number of lanes carries the same traffic, on different asphalt, while the other half of the road is reconstructed underneath the detour.

The numbers the county gave, and the one it did not

Construction began July 26, 2025. The county puts the job at approximately 70 percent complete and anticipates finishing the whole project in early spring 2027. That is roughly twenty months behind it and something under a year and a half ahead, on the county’s own dates, and the arithmetic in that sentence is this paper’s rather than the county’s.

What the release does not give is a volume. There is no traffic count in it, no design capacity, and no reference to the level-of-service standard the county sets for itself, which is the measure that says whether a road is carrying more than it was built to carry. The county’s stated purpose is that the improvements “are designed to support traffic flow and mobility along the corridor, particularly during peak travel periods near IGP and Pacetti Road.”

A level of service is a letter grade, A through F, that a county assigns to a road segment based on how much delay a driver meets at peak hour. It is the number that decides whether a new subdivision on that corridor can be approved, and a widening is one of the things that moves it. None of that appears in this announcement, which is an announcement about cones and not about concurrency.

Who said it

Valerie Pacetti, the project manager for St. Johns County Public Works, is quoted twice in the release.

The upcoming traffic shift marks an important step forward for the SR 16 Widening Project. We encourage drivers to pay close attention to the temporary signage and use caution as they become familiar with the new traffic pattern.

The second quotation thanks residents and motorists for their patience.

The county announced all of this on Sept. 9 and has published nothing about it since. Its news index has not carried a new item on the project in three weeks, and the newest thing on the index this morning is dated Sept. 30.