By Maggie Lee / Staff

North Fulton‘s cities are upping their chances for some major improvements on busy highways by collaborating with an Atlanta Regional Commission study team visiting the five city halls.

At the ARC road-show stop in Milton, about 30 residents showed up to talk about what would make their parts of the county easier to travel.

After a brief presentation, consultants laid out several large-scale maps — called charettes — of Milton and asked people to draw what they would like there.  One person wrote “greenways” in all caps over north Milton. Others attached stickers to Crabapple, showing they want to get there more easily.  But the most heavily marked route was Ga. 140, where traffic from Cherokee County cuts through Milton, clogging the route to Ga. 400.

 “We thought of the potential of having a fifth lane, a center lane, a through lane only that would not have access in and out” or a reversible lane, said Deborah Rogoff-Ezra, presenting the ideas of her charette group. 

“Some of the biggest challenges in the region are here in North Fulton like State Route 9 and 140,” acknowledged John Orr, a senior planner with the ARC.

Across all five cities, slowness on main corridors and  specific problem intersections were cited. 

Cathy Rhea can’t turn left out of New Providence Road to Arnold Mill, for example. There’s no traffic light and she’s been wanting one for more than 14 years.

“Everything after us got priority,” she said. 

Orr said big North Fulton projects have been toward the back of the line, too.

While there’s always been a North Fulton mayor on the powerful ARC board, only since Johns Creek and Milton incorporated did their mayors get a chance to sit at the table. Before that, Fulton’s at-large representative covered the northern reaches of the county. Now, by speaking together, all five interconnected cities perhaps can leverage their seat.

Besides that, according to Tim Preece, a consultant helping ARC run the study, “in the case of North Fulton, you have all these cities that are a bit different from one another, fairly unique. It would seem a little awkward to try to do a Fulton County transportation plan to comprise the whole area.”

But according to the consultants, widening roads alone can’t stop gridlock, even if Ga. 400 were 20 lanes wide.

Intersections like Rhea’s are the result of land-use patterns common in cities and towns since the 1960s: lots of residential neighborhoods with only one outlet. Instead of making one left turn, Rhea essentially must make several right turns and go a few miles out of her way to get onto Arnold Mill.

That makes arterial roads so essential that if there’s a wreck on Ga. 400 or other arteries, drivers generally have to wait for them to be cleared; there are few good alternate routes.

For that reason, ARC planners asked citizens where they would like to use bike paths, sidewalks or transit. Enough North Fulton residents live close to their jobs, according to ARC data, that they could be lured from their cars.  

Donald Williams said he finds it interesting that so many folks in North Fulton are interested in transit expansion, especially heavy rail.  He’s MARTA’s regional planning manager and has been looking in at the margins of the town hall meetings. 

“But, given the capital costs associated with heavy rail, it’s dependent upon what the state would do,” he said.  Expanding heavy rail would cost about $200 million per mile in North Fulton and likely could not be done without state and federal funds.

He’s more optimistic about the Georgia Department of Transportation’s so-called IT3 plan, which suggests, among other things, light rail in North Fulton and frequent buses along arterial routes. 

The ARC is compiling data it gathered in the town halls and will publish them  online in the near future.  By May, they plan to have drafted some proposals for city council hearings in late summer.  If all goes according to schedule, North Fulton will have a full set of regional transportation recommendations by fall.  Then comes the work of pushing for local, county, state and federal funding. 

The ARC is important because it’s the official regional planning agency for the 15-county metro. It is not a government agency, but it is the statutory forum through which officials of local governments in the Atlanta region confer to solve mutual problems and decide regionally important issues such as water use and transportation.