5 things to know about the planned tolls on I-285
A project to add express lanes to the eastern top end of I-285 moved forward this week with the State Transportation Board’s selection of a contractor to build and operate a roughly 20-mile stretch of new toll lanes in Fulton and DeKalb counties.
It’s a record-breaking deal: Construction costs are estimated at $8.9 billion, and the private companies doing the work have also agreed to pay Georgia $24.1 billion — a $23.6 billion concession fee and $515 million in expense reimbursement — in exchange for 50 years of future toll revenue along the route.
“This is very much a marathon of a project,” Transportation Commissioner Russell McMurry said in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Here are five things to know about the toll lanes.
Construction’s going to take time
The deal announced Thursday is just for Phase 1.
The Georgia Department of Transportation’s full plan for the eastern top segment runs about 34 miles total, and will take until 2042 to complete.
The first phase, with work to begin in 2028, will add two toll lanes to the outer loop. The lanes will run from Tucker near the Burnt Fork Creek over to Sandy Springs near the Chattahoochee River.
This part is scheduled to open in 2034.
Phase 2 is a rough mirror of that work along the inner lanes running in the opposite direction and will get underway shortly after the initial phase begins. Phase 3 will extend the toll lanes down to the I-20 interchange.
If it wants, GDOT can award future phases of work to the company, Top End Mobility Group, in charge of Phase 1 without putting the project out to bid again.
GDOT estimates design and construction costs for the entire segment could exceed $25 billion.
Toll rates are capped
GDOT has put limits on how much the Top End Mobility Group can charge drivers.
The maximum rate currently is set at $2.06 per mile — a rate that will be adjusted annually with inflation and based on traffic flow data once the lanes open.
The company has to guarantee speeds of at least 45 mph in the express lanes. In the event that speeds drop below that, the company can set tolls above the cap temporarily until traffic is flowing faster.
The State Road and Tollway Authority, which oversees the existing state-run toll lanes, will monitor the company’s pricing.
The Top End Mobility Group will collect revenue from the tolls for 50 years.
New bus routes are possible
MARTA doesn’t run routes on I-285 currently because the corridor is so congested.
The express lanes make that possible if MARTA or other regional transit providers wanted to add service in the future. Buses will have access to the lanes free of charge, and the guaranteed speeds make reliable routes possible.
A preliminary service plan from MARTA has identified nine potential new bus routes along the eastern top of I-285.
“There’s lots of opportunities to route bus rapid transit to major job activity centers, but then use I-285 to get you from place to place,” McMurry said.
Rapid bus routes can meet the needs for high-capacity transit at a much lower cost than high-speed rail, said Jannine Miller, who leads the state agency that oversees transit planning in metro Atlanta.
It’s even more affordable because the Top End Mobility Group, not MARTA or other transit providers, will be responsible for maintaining the roadway, she said.
More toll lanes coming after these
This project deals only with the top eastern half of I-285. But toll lanes are planned for the western top half, too.
Next year, GDOT will begin procurement for the western side, a process that will take about two years, McMurry said.
By the time procurement is finished, the I-285 westside rehabilitation work — this is the project that’s behind the full closures on multiple weekends this year — should be complete.
The westside express lanes will be a little simpler to build because the segment is not as developed, McMurry said.
As for toll lanes on the bottom half of I-285?
“That’s far out, but certainly would be something that needs to be done,” McMurry said.
There’s no specific southern I-285 express lane project on the books yet, however.
No one’s writing a $23.6 billion check
The Top End Mobility Group, which is a consortium of several international engineering, construction, and financial firms, offered Georgia a $23.6 billion concession fee as part of its bid.
It’s a record amount for an infrastructure project in the state of Georgia, dwarfing the $4 billion concession offered in the Ga. 400 project. On that project, a lump sum was due at the start of the work. In this case, the money will be paid out in equal sums over six years, about $4 billion per year.
Only a $515 million reimbursement of the state’s costs so far will be paid upfront.
GDOT can’t spend the concession money immediately. It’s essentially backing the federal loans that will help fund the project, and GDOT has to reserve 80% of the annual concession payments as a fail-safe in the event there’s some catastrophic issue with the work and the state has to terminate the contractor, McMurry said.