The new bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway is doing half its job. That, in essence, is the assessment from Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft, who says the span has improved the drive into the city but has left the bulk of the island with only one practical route out.
How the Current Pattern Works
Under the traffic pattern now in place, drivers move between the Beach Express, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and Fort Morgan using a set of one-way crossings:
- The new ICW bridge carries traffic southbound only, onto the island.
- The State Highway 59 bridge handles traffic in both directions and remains the principal artery.
- The former toll bridge near The Wharf in Orange Beach has been converted to a one-way northbound crossing.
The design was intended to increase throughput and reduce the congestion that chokes the area during peak beach season. Craft says that after more than a month with the full pattern in effect, the inbound half is performing about as expected. The outbound half is not.
The Problem: One Way Off the Island
“We are still struggling with the entire western two-thirds or three-fourths of this island with only one way off,” Craft said. Drivers in Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan and the western portion of Orange Beach can technically drive east to The Wharf and use the northbound crossing there. Overwhelmingly, they do not.
A preliminary origin-destination study backs him up: the large majority of departing drivers from those areas funnel onto SR 59. The mayor’s explanation is behavioral rather than technical. “Everybody has the opportunity to go past 59 and go down and get in line at The Wharf,” he said. “But I don’t know that anyone’s going to risk the unknown.” There’s no way to know if it’s any better down there or not.
That is a fair description of how drivers actually behave. Faced with a known queue and an unknown one several miles in the opposite direction, most people join the known queue. Sending traffic east to go north asks motorists to gamble, and they decline the bet.
A Design Gulf Shores Opposed From the Start
Craft was direct about the city’s position when the one-way configuration was chosen. The original plan called for a two-way bridge, and Gulf Shores fought the change. “The minute that Director [John] Cooper and ALDOT decided they wanted to do the one-way stuff, we were in opposition, but it didn’t matter,” Craft said. Director Cooper was in charge, and he did it like he felt it should be done.
That exchange captures a familiar dynamic in Alabama transportation politics. The state highway department controls the design of state-funded infrastructure, and a municipality’s objection, however well-founded, is advisory at best.
The City’s Plan Depends on New Leadership
Gulf Shores is developing a plan to fix the outbound bottleneck, but the mayor concedes it cannot advance under the current arrangement. The strategy is to gather rigorous traffic measurements first, then present the data to a new governor and new state transportation leadership. The ask would be twofold: convert the new bridge to two-way operation, and build a new connecting road feeding into it so that western Gulf Shores and Fort Morgan traffic has a genuine second exit.
The city has already finalized plans to secure a right-of-way through Gulf State Park should that road become possible, meaning the groundwork is in place and waiting on a decision it does not control.
Hurricane Evacuation
Asked about evacuation capacity, Craft said he is not worried. In a mandatory evacuation declared by the governor, the traffic pattern can be suspended: both the new bridge and the SR 59 bridge can be run northbound-only, giving the island two full outbound routes. The one-way restriction, in other words, is an everyday constraint, not an emergency one.
Why the Bridge Matters to the Regional Economy
The Intracoastal Waterway crossing is the gateway between the mainland and the Gulf Shores, Orange Beach and Fort Morgan peninsula, which together form the heart of the Alabama beach tourism economy. Summer brings millions of visitor-trips to Baldwin County, and the narrow set of river and bay crossings means that even small efficiency losses cascade into long backups on SR 59 and the Beach Express. A pattern that moves people in smoothly but traps them on the way out affects not just residents commuting home but the predictable flow of guests that coastal hotels, restaurants and retailers depend on.
What to Watch
The origin-destination study is the key document. If the finished data confirms what the preliminary numbers suggest, Gulf Shores will have a quantified case rather than an anecdotal complaint, and the argument shifts from what drivers ought to do to what they demonstrably do. Whether that case gets a hearing depends on who is running the state transportation department when the city brings it forward. Until then, the island lives with a one-way equation: easy in, hard out.
Fort Morgan and the Long Peninsula
The western and southern reaches of the island — Fort Morgan especially — are the most exposed to the one-way constraint. Those communities sit at the far end of a single-threaded route that must first thread through Gulf Shores and then compete for space at the SR 59 crossing. For year-round residents, the pattern is an everyday friction on school runs, commutes to jobs on the mainland and trips for groceries or medical care. For the seasonal renters and second-home owners who fill Fort Morgan in summer, it is a regular reminder that the peninsula has only one spine of asphalt carrying everyone in and out.
The Growth Pressing on the Crossings
Baldwin County has been among the fastest-growing counties in Alabama for years, and the beach communities at its southern tip have absorbed much of that pressure in the form of new lodging, short-term rentals and entertainment venues. Each addition puts more vehicles on the same limited set of bridges over the Intracoastal Waterway and the bay. Transportation planners across the Gulf Coast have long warned that the region’s explosive tourism and residential growth is outpacing the capacity of its river and bay crossings, which cannot be widened as easily as a surface street. The Gulf Shores experience with the one-way bridge is, in that sense, a local instance of a regional problem: the infrastructure that connects the island to the mainland was built for a smaller, slower place than the one that now uses it.