Lindgren Road

A rarity of the Florida State Roads system, Florida State Road 825 is an approximately three-mile-long north-south street connecting SR 94 (Kendall Drive/Southwest 88th Street) and Kendall-Miami Executive Airport in western Miami-Dade County, Florida. The Florida Department of Transportation added the route in the early 1980s in a campaign to increase access to the county’s commercial airports. Locally known as Southwest 137th Avenue and Lindgren Road, the four-lane divided highway is mainly used for commuting between South Miami Heights, Country Walk, and West Kendall.

While there is no doubt (from maps and signage) as to the exact location of the northern terminus, the southern terminus presents no such certainty. FDOT, Florida Highway Patrol, and Miami-Dade County documents offer conflicting versions: Southwest 120th Street, the airport entrance, and Southwest 136th Street are all offered as locations of the southern terminus, but the minimal signage along the road doesn’t confirm any of these possibilities (as of 2004, the southernmost SR 825 reassurance sign for southbound motorists is near an intersection with Southwest 104th Street, the historic western terminus of SR 990; the southernmost SR 825 reassurance sign for northbound motorists is placed just north of the intersection of SR 825 and Southwest 120th Street). At no time was the southern terminus of SR 825 a part of another Florida State Road (some 1980s’ road maps indicated a southern terminus of SR 825 at a “western terminus” of SR 992 on Southwest 152nd Street, but there was no evidence of this locally as there was never signage indicating this, and no official government map indicated it, either).

State Road 825 passes through a part of Miami-Dade County in which farmland is rapidly giving way to residential developments and business parks, an urbanization process that has been accelerating since the 1990s.

In addition to the uncertainty of the southern terminus location of SR 825, the State Road is anomalous in a couple of other ways. It is misnumbered: in Band 9, it lies further west than SR 985 (Southwest 107th Avenue north of SR 94) and SR 989 (Southwest 112th Avenue south of US 1) and east of SR 997 (Krome Avenue). Its location would normally merit a designation of Florida State Road 993 in the current grid method of numbering Florida State Roads instead.

Despite that it lies entirely on the mainland of Florida (and not surrounded by water), SR 825 connects to only one other State Road (SR 94) – this was not the case upon original designation (when it connected with SR 990 before the east-west route was drastically shortened to its current configuration) – and there is no connection between SR 825 and any designated County Roads.

With the continuing population growth of western Miami-Dade County and the current construction of the western extension of the Dolphin Expressway (first to Northwest 137th Avenue five miles to the north, then to Southwest 130th Street near Southwest 147th Avenue), the importance of SR 825 as a commercial and commuter highway is expected to continue to increase in the coming years.