Roadwork at Glades and Winikoff: Mystery Solved

Drivers on Glades Road west of Sandpiper Shores Elementary School have been wondering about roadwork in the median just east of Island Lakes and the intersection with Judge Winikoff. We finally solved the mystery. They’re extending the left turn lane all the way to the first tree, but as our readers have pointed out the first part of that lane is for U-turns only.
Here’s what it looked like before from above:

You can also see it on an embedded Google Maps satellite image, and you can play with that:

This will roughly double the length of that turn lane. We’re not sure if this is motivated by the afternoon rush hour traffic making left turns onto Winikoff, or perhaps by the after-school traffic from Sandpiper Shores making U-turns. We’d rather they turned this intersection into a roundabout, but that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
Here are some more pictures showing the roadwork up close:

In this next picture you can start to see how it’s forming a turn lane, and as a reader points out, it looks like they’re making a gap to allow U-turns before drivers get to the Winikoff intersection.

Here’s an even closer look at the hardware in place. The foreground shows the frame where the concrete for the remaining curb will be poured, and also where it looks like they’re breaking the curb to allow U-turns.

The above pictures were all taken looking eastbound toward 441. The next two are the opposite, westbound coming from 441, Mission Bay and Sandpiper Shores. First you can see where the start of the new curb was freshly poured. The concrete was still wet when we were this past evening.

There’s also a new drain they installed for storm water earlier. You can see by the color contrast how wet the freshly poured concrete curb is.

So … mystery solved. They’re extending the left turn lane and maybe they’re making it possible to make U-turns without hitting the crosswalk.