In the game
Trailer 2 has a road shot with a very particular flavor: a highway running straight to the vanishing point across flat swamp, a canal alongside, no buildings, no curves, just sky. Fans have matched it to Alligator Alley, and the match rests on that geometry. Florida has plenty of straight roads but only one that crosses the Everglades with a canal on one side for its entire length.
Rockstar hasn’t named it, and a straight road across marsh could be a composite of several. But if Grassrivers has a highway across the swamp, this is the road it’s built from, and it’s the road you’ll drive if you’re touring the real places on this site in one trip.
The real place
Alligator Alley opened in 1968 as a two-lane toll road, and the name began as an insult: the auto club said it would be good only for alligators. It was rebuilt as four-lane I-75 between 1986 and 1992, with fences and dozens of wildlife underpasses so that panthers and gators could cross beneath it. It runs about 80 miles from the western edge of Fort Lauderdale’s suburbs to the eastern edge of Naples with almost nothing in between.
Driving it today is a strange, meditative thing. The canal on the north side was dug for the fill the road was built on, and you’ll see gators sunning on its bank every few hundred yards if you’re paying attention. The detail a GTA fan will recognize is the emptiness: 80 miles at 70 mph with the same view the whole way, cypress heads on the horizon, and the feeling that the road is the only man-made object for miles.
Go there
Do it as the link between the two halves of a Grassrivers trip: airboats and Shark Valley on the Miami side, Big Cypress and Everglades City on the Gulf side, with the Alley in between (or the Tamiami Trail, which is the slower, older parallel road 20 miles south).
Fill up before you get on. The service plaza around mile marker 49, run by the Miccosukee Tribe, is the only fuel and food for the whole crossing. The rest area at mile marker 63 has a recreation access point with a boat ramp and a short path beside the canal where you can watch the gators safely; there’s another at mile marker 41. Do not stop on the shoulder to look at wildlife; the highway patrol will move you on and the semis won’t.
For a proper meal, Naples at the west end has a hundred options; Weston at the east end has the usual chains.
One honest warning: fog and smoke. Winter mornings bring fog banks that can cut visibility to nothing in seconds, and spring brings prescribed burns and wildfires whose smoke drifts across the road. Both have caused pile-ups. Slow down when you see it, and don’t drive the Alley at night in fog.
Nearby
- The gator in the pool: the Alley starts where Weston’s last subdivision ends.
- Big Cypress: take exit 80 (SR 29) south and you’re in the preserve within minutes.
- Everglades City and Chokoloskee: 20 minutes south of exit 80, the fishing town at the end of the swamp.
Updated September 12, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.