Whitlock Avenue debate hits hot buttons

Like swarming locusts that show up every few years, the “Stop the Road” signs are back in the Whitlock Avenue area of Marietta.

Someone has floated the idea, again, of widening the main thoroughfare leading into and out of the west side of the Cobb County seat. Such talk is heresy among Old Mariettans, who vigilantly guard the aesthetics of the two-lane road the way Buckhead residents want to protect West Paces Ferry Road or north Fulton residents guard Johnson Ferry Road from hordes of outsiders who use them to get somewhere else.

MIKE KING
MY OPINION

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STEPS TO EASE CONGESTION
• Marietta's largest employers -- county government, Lockheed Martin, WellStar Kennestone Hospital, the county school district and Southern Poly -- could organize car and van pools and provide subsidies for employees and students coming into the city from Acworth, Kennesaw and Paulding County.
• Cobb Community Transit and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority ought to run express buses for extended hours from those communities into the square and to commercial office locations during both the afternoon and morning rush.

But new homes and retail shopping malls in west Marietta, west Cobb County and neighboring Paulding County continue to be opened and pour new commuters daily onto the road. Whitlock area residents complain that it’s not their fault that development on the corridor hasn’t been better controlled, and the commuters complain that Marietta refuses to deal with the reality that it is no longer just a drive-through suburb.

Marietta businessman Larry Ceminsky, a member of the most recent task force to study the issue, has an interesting take on it: “We need to get folks to understand that other places are to us what we are to Atlanta. … You know, a job center,” he says. Sound familiar?

Widening Whitlock touches all the hot buttons of growth and development: traffic capacity, residential and commercial density, the lack of public transit and intergovernmental cooperation, to name a few. Marietta Mayor Bill Dunaway, first elected in 2001, pledged to tackle the Whitlock issue. He’s still trying. But every time he suggests a possible solution — including a few years ago revamping a 1980s-idea of a connecting road to take drivers off of Whitlock to get to Powder Springs Street — he gets pummeled by his Whitlock neighbors.

Dunaway correctly notes that doing nothing is not a solution. In fact, doing nothing has been de facto policy for Marietta on the Whitlock Avenue issue for more than two decades.

This latest proposal, the work of the advisory group, would add a westbound lane on Whitlock just beyond the city’s old neighborhoods to the other side of the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. It doesn’t involve the prettiest section of Whitlock, the tree-lined residential area closest to the city’s historic square. Along this two-lane stretch, by the way, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes is building a showplace Victorian-style home.

But that really doesn’t matter. Any talk of widening Whitlock is verboten in Marietta. Give them an inch along the road and they’ll take out your front lawn, many Mariettans believe. Tell those newcomers in Paulding and west Cobb to find another way to work. That was the dominant theme of a town hall forum Thursday night.

To be fair, city and county officials have tried a few things. The county four-laned the Dallas Highway portion, complete with a landscaped median, from Barrett Parkway to the Paulding line. The East-West Connector was supposed to take some of the traffic away, but it doesn’t appear to have worked.

Marietta widened some intersections on the two-lane stretch to allow traffic to slide around cars trying to turn left. The 1/4-mile in front of the new Marietta High School — which should never have been built on that site — is about six lanes across.

But the result has been a road that balloons and shrinks like a Russian weight lifter’s coronary arteries. Westbound rush-hour traffic still stalls on the Marietta side because too many lights are too close together. The National Park Service, which maintains control over a two-lane stretch that goes through the battlefield, seems less than inclined to allow any kind of widening. Previous park superintendents have been none too happy about Marietta’s decisions to allow new subdivisions at the foot of the mountain.

The issue cries out for innovative leadership. Maybe Whitlock’s newest resident will want to take a shot. Roy Barnes wasn’t shy about tackling metro Atlanta’s traffic problems when he was governor. Then again, none of those involved his front lawn.