Fast foot traffic

And then they made some 2,000 people pay a toll to use it anyway!

“Only in Atlanta, right?” Ashley Tingler panted along with the other early risers running from the Glenridge Connector to Lenox Road — and right through the tollbooths, where the 50 cents they ponied up went to Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta. “But I’d much prefer it go to charity than to what it was going to before.”

It was billed as the "Pay the Last Toll" race, a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity to run along one of Atlanta's most exasperating roadways and say good riddance to the toll booths that helped make it so. Sunday's event also brought things full circle: Twenty years ago, the only other running of this race went down the southbound side, just before the so-called "400 extension" opened through Buckhead and connected the northern suburbs directly to downtown Atlanta.

Take it from someone who was there both times: People liked the idea of paying tolls even less that day.

Maybe that’s not so hard to believe. Once incredibly controversial for introducing the “pay as you drive” concept to metro Atlanta, the 400 tolls are more a persistent irritant now as we all fumble for quarters or death-dart through traffic toward the Cruise Card lanes.

On Friday, the tolls will end for good, a fact that lent Sunday’s race a celebratory feel — runners kept stopping to pose for “We’re No. 1!”-ish photos in the toll booths.

Yet sentimentality also abounded. Talking about the “old” days, when, say, going from Alpharetta to the Fox Theatre would have involved a tortuous detour on I-285, runners wondered how we ever lived without this particular stretch of 400.

“It’s one of the few unpopular roads here that managed to get built,” marveled Brian Hampton, who lives in Morningside.

"And now it's too popular," Ethan Stettner of Marietta sighed on behalf of anyone who's ever tried to squeeze through Buckhead on 400 when it's rush hour, or there's a Braves game, or there's an "r" in the month.

It all would’ve been a little hard to believe on June 19, 1993, when 10,000 runners and curiosity seekers, a few protestors and one rather confused reporter showed up for the “Georgia 400 Road Race.” I was a fairly new hire at the AJC, which explains the coveted Saturday morning shift. And I was new to Georgia, which explains why I was baffled by all the hoo-hah over what was just another highway to me.

Except this wasn't just another highway. Opponents for years had fought against building the 6.2 mile extension, which eventually required dozens of houses to be razed and thousands of trees to be cut down in North Buckhead. People filed lawsuits over their depressed home values; sound barriers went up, though not well enough, apparently, for the protestor half a mile from the finish line that day.

I understood all that. What I didn't get at first was the grumbling a good number of the runners and walkers directed at the poor little (not even open yet!) toll booth plaza. What did I know? I was from New Jersey, where the state bird is the toll booth and we practically come out of the womb paying quarters to go places. But the idea of paying to drive on publicly-financed highways was new and distasteful to many Georgians, some of whom I got an earful from that day.

Now jump ahead 20 years to Sunday’s race, and you found a more benevolent attitude. Many of the runners plunked $1 or $5 bills into the buckets held by volunteers. Maybe they just couldn’t come up with two quarters after years of Cruise Card-ing it (You couldn’t go through with one stapled to your forehead. I asked.) Maybe they realized the extension — tolls, traffic jams and all — was better than the alternative for the past 20 years. Or maybe, like David Erwin, they were just being gracious winners.

If anyone who drives in metro Atlanta can ever really be considered a winner.

“I felt totally victorious,” Erwin, who commutes north from Brookhaven, said about flinging his final quarters. “Until I realized I was still going to have to pay the toll every day this next week.”