Yet this corridor is "one of the hottest retail submarkets in town," says The reason: people, the traffic they generate and the money they spend. Avalon Park Boulevard, for example, is $70,632 -- nearly 60 percent higher than the median of $44,236 for all of Orange County. And as anyone who drives Alafaya south of S.

R. 50 can attest, the traffic The daily traffic count between S.R.

50, also known as Colonial Drive, and Lake Underhill Drive already exceeds 60,000 vehicles. That puts the busy S.R.

50 itself and John Young Parkway, according to the Orange County Traffic Between Lake Underhill and Curry Ford Road, the traffic flow drops sharply, to fewer than 38,000 vehicles a day, then shrinks further to little more than 31,000 a day between Curry Ford and OUC's power plants. That's because of the current, heavy concentration of retail at the north end -- and the fact that two lanes toward the end, said Hazem El-Assar, the county's chief traffic Ford to its end near the power plants -- is moving forward, El-Assar said. Design work has started, and construction should be under way later this year.

officials, including Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty, have called it -- is in jeopardy now that the county has started work on Innovation Way, a boulevard Innovation Way, part of Crotty's broader vision of a high-tech-business corridor stretching from the University of Central Florida to the airport, southwest around the power plants to the BeachLine (S.R. 528) before eventually heading west to OIA, not far from a planned biomedical complex at The BeachLine interchange is now back on the front burner, having overcome and the airport will only strengthen lower Alafaya as a retail submarket, said Mike Byrum, senior associate with Mainsail Development Group LLC, which is retailers," he said.

Town Center, the 1.35 million-square-foot shopping complex at Alafaya and S.R.

408, the East-West Expressway. In the late 1990s, dueling developers were rushing to launch regional the Waterford Lakes area. The major department stores ultimately chose the time, said David Marks, owner of Marketplace Advisors, a "The Alafaya Trail area didn't have the population base in place," he said.

Still, Simon Property Group persisted and developed Waterford Lakes Town Center -- but built it as an open-air, campuslike complex anchored by a Super Target, a Best Buy electronics store and a Regal Cinemas.