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Q. I see that new lighted street signs have been installed on East Terry Street showing Imperial Street south of East Terry and Three Oaks Parkway to the north. My last understanding was that the entire road within city limits was to be called Imperial Parkway. Did I miss another renaming?

Keep up the good work.

Tom Williams/Bonita Springs

A. You didn’t miss a thing, Tom. The portion of the road that’s inside the city will indeed be called Imperial Parkway when it debuts in mid-January.

Randy Cerchie is the Lee County Department of Transportation project manager in charge of that project. He says the upshot of the signage slip-up is that contractor Posen Construction will be paying to correct them by the time the road opens.

In Posen’s defense, the road’s name has been etched in a substance more like sand than stone in the past. Back when the project was little more than a line on a bureaucratic map it was called Three Oaks. The city chose Imperial Parkway as the name for its segment in early 2005. On May 2 of this year a largely new council voted 4-3 to change it back to Three Oaks because council members believed retaining the name the road carries north of the city would mean one less thing to confuse drivers from out of the area. Right after that meeting, though, Councilwoman Martha Simons led the charge to change it back because the name Imperial Parkway recognizes one of the city’s finest amenities, the Imperial River. By the time the council met again May 16 the city had received more than 100 letters, e-mails and petition signatures in favor of Imperial Parkway. Hence, a unanimous vote in favor of Imperial Parkway came at that gathering.

Randy says the county did put through a notice asking Posen to order Imperial Parkway signs. However, something happened on Posen’s end and the wrong signs were ordered.

The contractor’s expense will likely be minimal, Randy says, because the existing signs can probably be modified by swapping out the panels that carry the road’s name.

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Q: I am concerned about the traffic signals at Highland Woods Boulevard and South Bay Drive at US-41 in Bonita Springs. Coming out of Highland Woods is a sign that says left lane traffic turns left at 41 and right lane traffic either goes straight or turns left. However when you get to the intersection, arrows are painted on the road indicating that the left lane may either turn left or go straight. This situation also exists on the west side of 41. I am concerned with all the influx of drivers that a bad accident will happen if the situation is not corrected.

Ray Fischer

A. Yikes! Right you are, Ray. I hope this doesn’t reflect poorly on my driving skills, but despite passing through that area fairly frequently I never noticed the flaw with the markings until receiving your e-mail.

Because Highland Woods and South Bay are city streets I took your question to Daryl Walk, Bonita’s public works director. It was news to Daryl, too. He took a ride out there and saw the same thing you did. Then he looked up some old aerial photographs of that area to figure out when and how the heck it happened.

Daryl’s conclusion is that the markings were done as part of the state’s widening of U.S. 41 a couple of years back. Apparently nobody noticed at the time that an accident could result if someone in the left lane opted to go straight across 41 at the same time someone in the right lane opted to hang a left.

The city contracts with Lee County to re-mark its intersections and the county performs that service a couple of times a year, visiting a list of streets where the existing markings have faded or need to be changed, Daryl says. He’s adding South Bay and Highland Woods to the list for the next visit. The county was here a couple of months ago so it will be a few more months before it returns. Daryl doesn’t feel there’s a need to schedule a special visit solely for that project because the current markings don’t seem to have caused an issue for drivers.

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(Karie Partington is the Bonita Springs Bureau Chief for the Daily News. E-mail questions for this column to her at kjpartington@bonitanews.com. Find a complete archive of the “In the Know” at naplesnews.com/intheknow/)