I-285 wreck shows lack of arterial roads

By Ariel Hart and Marcus K. Garner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Atlanta’s road system strikes again.

One of the most heavily traveled corridors in Georgia was still shut down Tuesday morning, eight hours after a wrong-way driver on I-285 struck and ignited a truck full of margarine. When the 200,000-plus drivers who take I-285 through Dunwoody every day looked for an alternative route, there wasn’t much of a place to turn.

Arterial highways, not necessarily interstates, are the backbone of daily travel in a well-planned metropolis, and Atlanta’s are sorely lacking -- narrow, winding and bewildering to anyone not deeply familiar with them.

Alyssa Willis, an insurance agent with a 15-minute commute, was smart: She didn’t take to the roads until after the accident was cleared, and she avoided I-285. Her commute still quadrupled.

“I’d already hit traffic on I-85 and Ga. 400, and I just decided it wasn’t worth it,” she said But when she reached the arterials, the eight-year Atlanta resident got lost. She had to pull off and Google her way to work.

The delay was costly. “I’m a small business owner, and if I’m not here, nobody is,” she said.

Miles from the scene of the disaster that killed 19-year-old Jacob Blackmore, surface streets like Johnson Ferry Road and Ashford-Dunwoody Road were flooded with overflow. Traffic in neighborhoods far removed from the incident moved like sludge.

Atlanta’s interstate highways consistently make the national rankings for worst bottlenecks (Spaghetti Junction and I-285 at I-75) or widest highways (I-75 in Cobb). But experts have also leveled blistering criticism at the interstates' smaller sisters, the arterials.

“Primitive,” “significant difficulties,” and “the primary cause of some of the region’s worst congestion” are quotes from reports a decade ago about Atlanta’s arterial road system. One of those was produced by the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority.

Wendell Cox’s 2000 report enumerated the problems: short roads cobbled together in jagged patchworks, narrow roads, no shoulders, roads built decades ago and not improved to accommodate the residents and businesses brought by development.

“I hate to tell you but I’d rather drive any time in L.A. than Atlanta,” said Cox, a transportation analyst who rates Atlanta’s arterial system probably second-worst among the 20 largest urban areas. “You do not have alternatives.”

The 18-county Atlanta region plans to spend $5.5 billion over the next 30 years expanding arterial roads, including Ga. 20, Cobb Parkway and Covington Highway. But there’s another $7.5 billion worth of needed projects that the region can’t yet afford.

"We don’t have the connectivity on the arterial network that some other regions do, and I think it’s because we put too much stock in the interstates years ago," said Chick Krautler, director of the Atlanta Regional Commission.

The ARC is now conducting a federally funded study to identify a comprehensive plan for funding arterials.

Part of the problem is that Atlanta's patchwork of roads is in a patchwork of governments, which don't always see the forest for the trees.

"Just the controversy of what some local governments want versus what’s needed for the region, that's been a conflict," said ARC's transportation planning chief, Jane Hayse.

The consequences were felt in people's lives Tuesday.

Nicole Acosta, who drives every day from Calhoun to Norcross for work, spent three hours on the road.

She usually travels south on I-75 to I-285, leaving home around 6:45 a.m. But Tuesday, she took a 90-plus-mile triangular route, driving into downtown Atlanta to take I-85 north, then head west on the Perimeter to Peachtree Industrial Boulevard.

“There is no really good detour if I-285 is closed, ever,” Acosta said. “You can take surface streets, but it just isn't worth it.”

Colleen Hartman, a native of the Chicago area, couldn’t believe she was stuck in traffic more than eight hours after the wreck. Mainly, she didn't understand the time it took to clean up.

“Why is it that an accident that happened overnight isn’t cleaned up yet,” she wondered aloud at 8:30 Tuesday morning. “It’s butter. It’s not even toxic. So why can’t we get this cleaned up?”

The DOT said about 15,000 gallons of water were used to fight the fire. The DeKalb County Fire Department, which dealt with the wreck, could not explain in detail Tuesday afternoon how they put out the fire.

DeKalb Deputy Fire Chief Eddie O’Brien said in an e-mail that his firefighters typically don’t use fire retardants on wrecks because they present a potential environmental hazard if they are washed into sewers through highway runoff drains.

“On this particular call, the fire had already engulfed the vehicles and our primary concern was the patients involved in the accident,” O’Brien wrote.

Hartman said the trouble opening up roads looks bad on the heels of the ice storm that shut down metro Atlanta.

“Basically, today was a failure.”

However, an expert in fighting major fires, said the the firefighters appear to have done all they could.

“The fact that it takes a while doesn’t surprise me at all," given how hot the margarine would burn, said Vincent Brannigan, a professor at the University of Maryland’s Department of Fire Protection Engineering. He praised the firefighters based on what he could see from pictures of the truck posted on ajc.com. “They got a good knock-down on that fire,” he said.

Blackmore was killed instantly as his Toyota Corolla careened into the tractor trailer 57-year-old Rory Stewart was driving, according to Dunwoody police. Investigators had not determined Tuesday afternoon how Blackmore got onto the interstate going the wrong way.

Stewart, the drive of the truck, wasn’t injured.

Rebecca Bowen, a copy editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, apparently saw Blackmore's car just before the crash. Bowen said she was in the second lane from the left -- the same lane as the wrong-way driver -- when she saw a car coming right at her.

"I started to slow down, and he kept coming," said Bowen, who said she couldn't move into the lane to her right because of other traffic.

"He was about a few hundred feet in front of me and he steered to the right into the innermost lane," and kept going, Bowen said.

Staff writer Mike Morris contributed to this article.