The July Fourth weekend saw the massive, synchronized effort to shut down and reopen Peachtree Road/Street between Buckhead and Midtown for the annual Atlanta Journal-Constitution Peachtree Road Race on the 3rd and 4th. The extended holiday also began with a boondoggle of a half-hour closure of I-285 during the 6 a.m. hour of Friday, July 2. Future traffic controllers can learn plenty from both.
Atlanta Police and the Atlanta Track Club began closing Peachtree and surrounding roads near the Lenox Mall start line around 2 a.m. last Saturday and Sunday, as the race took place across two days to keep crowds spread out. They also had 10th Street right at the Piedmont Park finish line closed for a couple of days, which is customary for any big festival to stage inside the park.
But the crux of the Peachtree closures that stretched for miles through Buckhead and Midtown didn’t begin until 4:30 a.m., just two hours before the races began. This is a large annual interruption, as not only is Peachtree closed, but any road that needs to cross Peachtree is affected. Finding ways in and out of neighborhoods (or our Midtown WSB studios) gets tricky. So the pressure to open Peachtree as soon as possible is high. And that’s just what officials did.
As soon as the final wave left the start line in the 8 a.m. hour, crews began dismantling the start line structures and moving barriers. Parts of Wieuca, Roxboro, Lakeside and even Peachtree opened just north of the start line. Once the structures came down safely and the last runners were far enough down the course, an armada of police vehicles and garbage trucks (at least a dozen) slowly moved down the course in a rolling reopening of arguably Atlanta’s most well-known road. Almost all of Peachtree was open by 10 a.m., leaving just parts of 10th, Monroe, 8th, and Peachtree Place closed around Piedmont Park, where runners finished and gathered.
The Atlanta Track Club did a tremendous job of alerting local outlets, residents and participants of what roads would close when and stuck to that schedule. They did not promise roads would open any earlier than noon but started doing so just as soon as was .
Both the closing and reopening of Peachtree were pronounced, efficient, coordinated and well-announced. I covered this from the WSB 24-Hour Traffic Center last Saturday, exactly 24 hours after a real mess of a freeway closure that caused a big delay.
Most overnight road work closures on freeways and major roads conclude by 5 or 6 a.m. The lane closures for the extensive I-285/GA-400 project often are finished before 5, when traffic volume is extremely light. But the July 2 double-right lane closure on I-285/westbound (Outer Loop) from Chamblee Dunwoody Road (Exit 30) to GA-400 (Exit 27) continued past 6 a.m., something that raised the WSB Traffic Team’s eyebrows.
We launched the WSB Skycopter from DeKalb Peachtree Airport at our scheduled 6 a.m. liftoff and went straight to the scene only to see all lanes of I-285/westbound traffic being held back and paced at Peachtree Industrial Boulevard (Exit 31). Just a couple of people from a much larger road crew were picking up this three-mile stretch of cones painstakingly from east to west.
We wondered why this closure went for such a long stretch, necessitated all lanes being paced and was taking so long to clear. As police inched the growing logjam of traffic forward, HERO units had to clear two cars out of travel lanes that had wrecked before the closure began, delaying a reopening. At the front of the closure near GA-400, some parts of the crew were not removing the cones, which they could have been doing while the HEROs cleared the wreck.
Before traffic pacing began, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution photographer John Spink reached out to us. He remembered a GDOT press release from June 23 about the new I-285/westbound ramp to GA-400/northbound scheduled for an opening the morning of July 2. The press release stated the ramp would open at 9 a.m. I called GDOT’s 511 Traffic Management Center to confirm this since these new ramps begin earlier and can confuse motorists. The operator told me this new ramp would not open until Sunday, July 11.
So as I watched above in the Skycopter, seeing the rolling shut down of I-285 back the westbound traffic back to I-85, I was not under the impression that a new ramp was opening. Then, at 6:42 a.m., traffic finally let loose in the through lanes of I-285. But I noticed they were still pacing traffic up a new, longer ramp to GA-400/northbound that now began just before Peachtree Dunwoody Road (Exit 28).
The June 23 press release on this opening mentioned nothing of a giant traffic pace needed to shepherd traffic to the new ramp. It also came out nine days before the closure, meaning it wouldn’t be top of mind to recipients. And it wasn’t on the radar at all of the 511 operators, the people who actually communicate with road crews, HERO operators, and motorists. GDOT sends out several releases each week about construction, so leaving out any language about a 30-minute shutdown makes this particular release blend in with the rest.
People simply could not plan their pre-July Fourth getaway or last trip to the office around this closure, because seemingly no one knew it was going to happen.
I’ve reached out to GDOT during and after the closure to figure out why they had to pace traffic for so long, why it had to happen in the morning drive and why 511 operators weren’t even aware of the ramp opening. The organization owns any mistakes and says they are working on the answers about doing this the right way.
Back in October of 2020, GDOT opened the first new ramp in this interchange to a chorus of confusion, which also included early Monday morning traffic pacing. The opening of the new GA-400/southbound ramp to Abernathy just before last Thanksgiving also began in AM drive but was open in the 5 a.m. hour on a Monday. At the time, spokesperson Natalie Dale told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 95.5 WSB that openings like this happen at the end of weekend work cycles, because they require major closures and detours beforehand.
The new I-285/westbound ramp to GA-400/northbound starts earlier and is well-marked with pavement shields. There seems to have been little confusion in the interchange since it opened. But its opening just before 7 a.m. on a Friday, a full two hours before the press release said, makes little sense. And if they knew a major traffic pace would precede a half-hour closure, why not include that in the press release? And why do this in the morning drive?
There will be plenty GDOT can learn again from this inefficient rolling opening of a new I-285 ramp. These lessons will come both internally and from how APD and the Atlanta Track Club brilliantly handled and executed the Peachtree Road Race closures. By the way, the new I-285/eastbound ramp to Glenridge Drive (Exit 26) is scheduled to open at 5 a.m. on Tuesday with a different starting point. Take note. The WSB Traffic Team will be all over it.
Doug Turnbull, the PM drive Skycopter anchor for Triple Team Traffic on 95.5 WSB, is the Gridlock Guy. He also hosts a traffic podcast with Smilin’ Mark McKay on wsbradio.com. Contact him at Doug.Turnbull@cmg.com.
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