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Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Do 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?
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