Home > Snellville.Talk > Archives > 2007 > May > 23 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USDo medians affect your shopping decisions?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We all have monster roads and means of dealing with them.
In Snellville, my monster is U.S. 78. My key to taming it is how I handle left turns and reversible lanes.
Reversible lanes can work if everyone knows how to use them. They don’t. So I stay out of them. I also avoid turning left onto U.S. 78 except at traffic lights or at 2 a.m. when volume has slowed to a trickle. I’ll turn right and find a place to turn around instead.
Considering these behaviors, I don’t think I will be affected much by the medians planned for the road. I’m already doing what medians force drivers to do.
The construction phase of those medians, however, is a different matter. The roadwork will affect everyone.
Bids for the work were opened last week. If the review of the apparent low bid — submitted by C.W. Matthews Contracting Co. at $31.5 million - finds no glitches, construction should begin this summer near the west end of the project at Park Place.
The project not only will remove the reversible lanes and place raised medians in the road, it will include sidewalks, intersection improvements landscaping and high technology traffic synchronization.
The Evermore Community Improvement District also is working on providing better connecting access in areas along the sides of the road so drivers do not have to get back on the highway to go from one store to the next.
The Evermore CID, an organization formed to improve the 7-mile stretch of U.S. 78 from Stone Mountain to Snellville, is working with Georgia Department of Transportation to minimize the inconveniences construction will bring.
The work is to be done in off-peak and evening hours. It is to be done in stages, with never more than two stages under way at the same time. There will be additional police available for traffic control; there will be Highway Advisory Radio (an AM station that provides information to motorists). There will be signs and other efforts to ease the pain.
But there will be pain. There will be delays. The inconveniences will last until the project is complete, which C.W. Matthews states will be by Oct. 31, 2009.
Once we reach that point, once we have survived all of the construction woes, what then?
I thought about this as I perused the website for the Evermore Community Improvement District the other day (www.78cid.org/editorial.htm). An editorial on the site quoted various studies of median projects across the country that caused little or no loss of business to merchants along the routes.
Brett Harrell, executive director of the Evermore CID, points out that the Mall of Georgia area, the hottest shopping spot in the county, faces a road (Ga. 20) with medians. If planned properly, a median road can be an asset, he said.
There are, of course, other opinions. We’ve all heard them from business owners along Memorial Drive and Jimmy Carter Boulevard when medians were installed there.
Most susceptible are businesses, such as gas stations, that depend on drive-by or impulse purchases. If access is tricky, drivers may keep moving, hoping for a more convenient one up the road.
What do you think? Do medians affect your shopping decisions? Do you think they will help or hurt U.S. 78?
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Susan Gast
Comments
By Greg
May 23, 2007 9:58 PM | Link to this
Medians won’t affect my decisions, it may affect some but for the most part I think if a person is determined to get to a particular place he or she will get there, median or no median. It looks like the decline of business along Memorial Drive and JCB is not due to a median but more due to the clientele of the area. Many of us can remember when Memorial Drive was the happening area back in the day, but now with all the crime in the area a lot of the community has taken their business elsewhere. If 78 stays clean and safe a median shouldn’t have a negative impact on businesses.
By Pam
May 24, 2007 8:21 AM | Link to this
I agree with Greg, the median shouldn’t effect anyone’s decision to shop with a merchant. If the merchant makes it’s location a worthwhile destination, customers will come. Focus more on curb appeal, customer service and products and your business will flourish.
By Katie
May 24, 2007 8:31 AM | Link to this
I also agree with Greg. Memorial Drive and JCB owe their decline to the crime element that took over. Memorial Drive is nothing more than a cess pool. The business owners let the “bad guys” take over and then they fled, leaving nothing but several hundred auto parts stores. No civic pride remains.
By Meg
May 24, 2007 12:16 PM | Link to this
Atlanta traffic,period, affects my shopping decision, I buy everything at Amazon and drugstore.com. The UPS guy just brought cereal, hamburger helper, and cake mixes from amazon, they were all on sale cheap. I only go to the store for milk, bread, and eggs (although I have powdered eggs and milk from honeyvillegrain.com in a pinch!) and meats. When I lived back home I loved to shop but now it’s a nightmare to go anywhere, and when you get there it’s crowded and the lines are long, no matter where you go. Ugh. I’ll take the internet any day. Christmas toys and presents, clothes, groceries, I can get them all without being stuck in traffic with people who drive like idiots and a city that doesn’t enforce traffic laws. (Hmmm, suppose the two are connected?)
By HAROLD
May 24, 2007 12:49 PM | Link to this
ONLY IF IT MAKES THE FEDEX TRUCK LATE DELIVERING MY PACKAGES. YOUD HAVE TO BE AN IDIOT TO GO TO A MALL THESE DAYS.
By carter
May 24, 2007 1:31 PM | Link to this
My wife has an Olympic gold medal in shopping,she would never purchase food online, it must be inspected and eyeballed,there’s always a chance they would send a box with a ding or bent place on it. A median keep my wife ot of a store, no way, a battalion of communist Chinese soldiers armed with AK47s couldn’t accomplish that feat. She’d be shopping before they had breakfast. Her mother raised her in Rich’s she had a PHD in shopping before she was in kindergarten.The last few years I’ve done quite a bit of shopping on line, it’s a lot easier. It used to be fun living in Atlanta but the last two decades have changed that, now now most of our friends are escaping, and we’ve purchased a lot in Bonita Beach Fl.and we are going to attempt to escape next year. I can’t wait I’m like a child waiting for christmas.
By Publius
May 24, 2007 1:31 PM | Link to this
Crime rates affect my shopping decisions. When are people going to realize that crime is the problem in South Gwinnett? Ignore it and it WON’T go away.
By JJ
May 24, 2007 1:54 PM | Link to this
I get out very early and do all my shopping before most people are out of bed on Saturdays. No traffic, no lines, no waiting at Waffle House, and we are home by 11:00-noonish, and I have the entire weekend free.!!!!! Usually I run most errands after work, so I can free up my weekend. I much prefer to be doing yardwork, or out playing, than sitting in traffic, only to stand in line for 30 minutes…….
By Paul A.
May 24, 2007 2:35 PM | Link to this
Medians help more than they hurt. Yes they can be inconvenient at times BUT they also prevent some idiot from turning left into a gas station at 5:30pm during rush hour. Wanna clear up Peachtree during the day???? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE install them on Peachtree Street from the Fox Theatre all they way down past the Brookhaven MARTA station. NO MORE MORANS TRYING IMPOSSIBLE FEATS OF PURE STUPIDITY.
As for the routes mentioned earlier … It’s already been said by the bloggers above. IT”S THE CRIME AND GANGS!!!!! That’s what wrong with JCB and Memorial Drive. Until that problem is solved local government is banging it’s brains into a brick wall.
By nrgpill
May 25, 2007 10:33 AM | Link to this
Implementing a median can be beneficial if done right (Rodeo in LA for example). Jimmy Carter Blvd is an example of how not to implement a median. It is a complete eye sore and it adds to the overall blight in that area.
If the median is properly landscaped with trees and lightposts, a median can help hide the ugly such as powerlines and loosely hanging traffic signals.
By artyc
May 26, 2007 4:15 PM | Link to this
median’s do kill business no one will make a u-turn and come back. sell your business fast. look at state bridge rd. half the small business folded up.
By Bill Wright II
May 26, 2007 7:01 PM | Link to this
Yes it does, if it is a hassle getting their I go on down the road. If their is a stupid divider I try and plan my route to be on the correct side of the divider.
By Joe Bragg
May 27, 2007 8:15 PM | Link to this
The businesses along State Bridge Road keep folding up because there is a tremendous glut of retail space in north Fulton. You have half-empty strip malls littering many roads such as Holcomb Bridge, State Bridge, and Alpharetta Highway.
The places initially open up with higher-end retail (witness the shopping area near Windward and Deerfield) and eventually they spiral downward to low-end retail such as nail salons and dollar stores as you’ll find in almost every strip mall in Roswell.
And they keep building more.
By James C.McCoy
May 29, 2007 4:19 PM | Link to this
Man are you people dull!Not one of you whiners have offered a solution?
By Katie
May 30, 2007 8:01 AM | Link to this
Maybe if we were engineers we could offer a solution. I think what we are offering are warnings, and valid ones at that. It’s up to the business owners to make sure that this works. If they sell a decent product for a fair price, then they won’t have to worry about people being too lazy to turn around and shop at their store. When they board up their businesses and leave an empty store front, that’s when the area starts to look crime ridden and run down.