I-285 toll lanes could harm Dunwoody (Atlanta, Sandy Springs: schools, legal, centers)

[cqholt]

They can’t contemplate how all 4 quadrants of the metro ultimately get funneled onto a single trunk highway with no alternate routes would disperse traffic.

I-285 Atlanta Bypass

[arjay57]

Sounds like folks up in Dunwoody and Sandy Springs are getting pretty worried about having this thing rammed through their community.

As the Georgia Department of Transportation moves ahead on plans for a new system of toll lanes along Ga. 400 and I-285, frustration and fear are rising among residents concerned about a different toll – the one on their homes and back yards for possible land-taking.

At three community meetings in Dunwoody and Sandy Springs in January, GDOT officials disappointed residents by claiming it’s too soon to know property impacts of the lanes, which could require widening the highways and which may rise over 30 feet high. In a backlash to those meetings, several homeowners reported that GDOT is studying or making offers for land-taking in their yards. And it was revealed that among the options under GDOT consideration is demolishing eight homes on Sandy Springs’ Crestline Parkway for an interchange and tearing down part of a Dunwoody townhouse while leaving the rest standing.

More...Fear rises as GDOT eyes back yards, houses for toll lanes

[cqholt]

Originally Posted by arjay57

Sounds like folks up in Dunwoody and Sandy Springs are getting pretty worried about having this thing rammed through their community.

All in the name of saving drivers a few minutes!

[Need4Camaro]

Originally Posted by cqholt

I-285 Atlanta Bypass

The current Atlanta Perimeter (I'm sorry to say) is very much obsolete. By the time you reach it, you are WELL into the metro of Atlanta. The only thing it really bypasses today is the core of the city.

Also arguably, I find top end traffic (between I-85 Dekalb, GA-400 Fulton, and I-75 Cobb) to be worse than the Connector. Infact most times when I have driven from Cobb to Gwinnett or vice versa during commute hours, I have found it faster to literally drive toward Downtown to the connector and take either I-75 to Cobb or I-85 to Gwinnett.

As for the I-75/I-85 'trunk', one should note that thru trucks are banned from using it to begin with if I'm not mistaken. While I'm not against this, one should also realize, this also doubles I-285's payload on top of much the denser districts on the northern side of I-285 and the local commuter traffic it must handle while being literally the only feasible by-pass in the entire Southeastern Region to go around Atlanta, for traffic coming across multiple regions (Midwest, Northeast, Southwest, and even the Southeast) - all interstate traffic is literally forced to travel through the metro to reach any quadrant of the country in perspective to the interstates that travel through Atlanta.

See, I-285 is a fairly wide Interstate (mainly on the top end) but the issue isnt lane capacity, but redundancy and thats where I feel Atlanta's biggest weakness is.

I personally think I-285 could actually lose lanes and still flow better than it does today with thoroughly planned interchanges and less intersections around them.

Now whether more highways would have brought more traffic? I would say it probably would have. But at the same token it also would have dispersed traffic away from core routes and provided feasible alternatives rather than feeding everyone toward the core of the city before dispersing them in the directions they need to go.

Now with all this stated, none of this is stating this eliminates the need for an effective mass transit throughout the metro, but mainly to state in current form by modern standards metro Atlanta's roads are not in their most optimal / efficient form.

At this point it would cost the unthinkable to reverse and completely redo the Metro's roadways, except for maybe to route new tolled expressways around the metro to allow truck or inter-regional traffic continue without passing through it (and trust me when I say I would GLADLY pay to bypass the metro if I needed to get through it during commute hours. I've done so in Houston as well..and it was worth every penny.) which is why I feel transit needs to be enforced more rigidly throughout the metro and afterward either make incentives for using it or tax drivers who have FEASIBLE alternative means of travel who still choose to drive. That and maybe in some way make more incentitve to carpool. I could see that reducing the burden on the current infrastructure...but one must note, even though there ARE alot of single drives in the metro (and the rest of America) -- Atlanta's freeway system was really only designed to accomodate the infrustructural needs of the late 80's and early 90's and predictions have far exceeded what they accounted for during that time.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by cqholt

All in the name of saving drivers a few minutes!

And that would likely be drivers who don't even live there. Frankly it's unlikely to even accomplish that.

[Need4Camaro]

Originally Posted by arjay57

And that would likely be drivers who don't even live there. Frankly it's unlikely to even accomplish that.

Yes, but is it the commuters fault that those areas which are largely unaffordable to not only the average citizen in Atlanta but also most of America just so happened to become job hubs and many of which are poorly or completely unserviced by transit?

In general, it wouldn't have mattered where those job hubs were located. They could have been placed in Snellville, and land-values in those areas would sky rocket, then basic supply and demand principals multiply, and eventually only the upper class can forsee abiding in those communities. Everyone WANTS to live closer to where they work, but not everyone can feasibly achieve this.

[sedimenjerry]

Originally Posted by Need4Camaro

I will say, as it currently stands, Texas definitely is outpacing Georgia in growth and development however one thing that does kind of worry me about Texas is, what happens when the oil industry goes south. Texas infrastructure is down right amazing but my concern is, do they have the capacity to maintain it in the future especially if things arent economically as bright as they are today.

I don't think people give enough credit for the diversity of industry. I have a very good friend that works as an oceanographer in Houston. Oil and Gas is a major, major industry for them. They have a lot of O&G clients. He's told me (over the last year and a half or so) that everyone at the company is a little on edge because O&G hasn't fully recovered after falling from its peak and I've heard others say that O&G isn't back at its peak. Meanwhile, you have Houston growing like crazy, outpacing DFW and Atlanta by percentage, and O&G isn't even 100%. While I was down there I kept hearing about how bad it was for O&G but all I saw was more and more development.

[Gulch]

Originally Posted by arjay57

Sounds like folks up in Dunwoody and Sandy Springs are getting pretty worried about having this thing rammed through their community.

They should be.

[MattCW]

The good news is they'll probably have the political power to stop this nonsense. The bad news is they'll be so turned off by this that they probably wouldn't support a transit line afterwards either.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by sedimenjerry

I don't think people give enough credit for the diversity of industry. I have a very good friend that works as an oceanographer in Houston. Oil and Gas is a major, major industry for them. They have a lot of O&G clients. He's told me (over the last year and a half or so) that everyone at the company is a little on edge because O&G hasn't fully recovered after falling from its peak and I've heard others say that O&G isn't back at its peak. Meanwhile, you have Houston growing like crazy, outpacing DFW and Atlanta by percentage, and O&G isn't even 100%. While I was down there I kept hearing about how bad it was for O&G but all I saw was more and more development.

Dallas employment is every bit as diverse as Atlanta's and Houston's, while not quite so much, is pretty diverse as well. O&G crashed and Houston was still one of the fastest growing metros.

And I would say Dallas and Atlanta are probably significantly more diverse than most cities in their employment base (At least since the 2008 recession crushed Atlanta's real estate industry).