Ga. 400 interchange will get boost, but how much?

The 200,000 drivers who stop and go each day through the Ga. 400/I-285 interchange, it turns out, are lucky.

Sort of.

Following the failure of the T-SPLOST transportation referendum in metro Atlanta last summer, the only project singled out for protection by Gov. Nathan Deal was that interchange. In doing more with less money, Deal said in a statement, the state would now have to focus on such “need-to-do” projects — and tighten belts elsewhere.

So what does that mean for drivers there and taxpayers? And what makes that project so special?

The congestion at Ga. 400 and I-285 consistently draws attention. It’s near the massive Perimeter office, medical and shopping market that rivals some cities in size. It also is a gateway to heavily Republican voting districts in north Fulton. State and regional planners are now launching an effort to see whether the interchange can be rebuilt sooner than their current deadline of 2040.

Wayne Kibler, a Sandy Springs store manager, drives Roswell Road from his home in Buckhead to avoid the Ga. 400/I-285 interchange — when he isn’t riding his bicycle and avoiding traffic altogether. “It’s bad. Even on a weekend, it’s bad, really bad,” he said of the interchange. “To make improvements it’d be awesome.”

The main question is how fast the interchange, built in the early 1970s and connected south to Atlanta in 1993, can get expanded now.

“Even if somebody magically pulled $500 million out of a hat tomorrow, it would still be many years before it got constructed anyway,” considering the time required to study and design the project and to acquire land, said David Haynes, a transportation planner at the Atlanta Regional Commission. “It’s the nature of the beast.”

What to do

Following the lead of regional leaders who drew up the project list for the T-SPLOST, the state is starting by breaking the interchange off from other projects to which it was tied. It is essentially giving up on grander schemes along the entire corridor, at least for the moment, to chew this more manageable bite.

Left in its dust will be “Revive 285,” the $2 billion-plus comprehensive congestion relief project across the Perimeter’s top end that has received dollops of publicity over the past half-dozen years. Conceived in flusher times, Revive 285 is still in planning. But it is not scheduled for construction for another 20 to 30 years.

Even with the interchange set free of that schedule, the big question will be whether the state can find the money to speed up even this “smaller” $450 million standalone project. Just the effort to replan it on its own will cost $2 million, an expense expected to be approved by the ARC, the region’s planning agency, next month.

New taxes? No thanks, say Deal and his staff.

A tolled interchange? Likely not, officials say, before the highways around it add optional toll lanes.

The governor’s bond borrowing package to be proposed in January? For the ports, yes, but for this project, “difficult.”

Instead, said Deal’s transportation planning director, Toby Carr, “we’re looking at getting it done with existing resources.”

The sad truth is that without new money, to make it happen sooner will require finding money in a project budget where almost every penny is intended for other projects.

That doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

“It is a priority project,” Deal told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a recent interview. “It may very well be” moved up in the project schedule, Deal said. “Any time I think that we all sort of agree it’s a priority project, in order to make it a priority project you have to move it up. But that final decision has not been made.”

Still, it’s a tricky calculation.

People will have to accept that after voting down the T-SPLOST’s 1 percent sales tax, unless other new money is found, moving the project up would take money from other projects, said Decatur Mayor Bill Floyd, who sat on the panel that put together the T-SPLOST project list.

“When you make a choice like that, somebody or something or some place is going to suffer,” said Floyd, who also is on the ARC board. “I’m not saying it’s the wrong choice, it’s just a choice you have to make because there’s not enough money to go around.

“Quite honestly, there are going to be some very, very, very difficult choices in the metro area over the next four or five years with regard to transportation,” Floyd said. “And they’re not going to be fun. For anybody.”

Special status

Why this interchange?

Deal says it’s simple: traffic.

“We know it is one of the major congestion areas in our metro Atlanta area,” Deal said. “For that reason alone, if we can facilitate a more orderly flow of traffic, that has great benefits, and certainly that interchange I think has been identified by most everybody as being one of the major problems we have.”

It’s congested, but it’s not the most congested. That honor often falls to the Downtown Connector, though a piece of Ga. 400 in Roswell did win most congested corridor in metro Atlanta, according to the traffic technology firm Inrix last year.

However, Carr points out that when mayors and county commissioners from across the region put together the T-SPLOST list, they also singled out the Ga. 400/I-285 interchange for the biggest single chunk of road money.

In addition, the state will be pulling down the Ga. 400 toll booth next year, a move likely to increase traffic. And if it ever does add optional toll lanes alongside Ga. 400 or I-285, the interchange will need to handle that additional traffic smoothly.

Then there are the jobs.

Bob Voyles recalls the 17 years he spent commuting to the area — working his commute around his favorite radio show because he knew how much time he’d spend in traffic. A metro Atlanta real estate bigwig, his firm manages several properties in the Perimeter area.

Voyles pushed for the T-SPLOST and has lobbied Deal for the interchange project. If his tenants can’t get around, he said, they’ll go elsewhere, and the Atlanta area will lose potential relocating businesses.

And that’s a lot of business. The office market at the Perimeter and up Ga. 400 to Alpharetta exceeds 40 million square feet, according to Voyles, approaching the size of the entire Nashville market and roughly two-thirds that of Charlotte. “It is a huge market,” he says. So huge he believes the geographic center of the metro area’s job market is closer to the Glenridge Connector than downtown.

Not only that, he pointed out, but the interchange slows traffic on I-285, which ends up slowing traffic headed in all directions of the metro area.

“For people commuting through the [Perimeter] market going downtown, from north Fulton suburbs or going across I-285 to Cumberland to Marietta, from east or west, they all have to go through the Ga. 400 interchange,” he said.

That is true. It’s also true that the interchange occupies a remarkable spot on a political map: smack dab at the gateway to heavily Republican northern suburbs.

“The big beneficiary [of the project] is the area from Dahlonega to the Dunwoody corridor,” said Neill Herring, a lobbyist for the Sierra Club. “Those people will be able to come down and once again rely on 285 west to get to the airport. …Those are higher-income donors that donate to campaigns.” Herring wishes the governor were concentrating instead on mass transit for the corridor.

Voyles, who gave money to two opponents of Deal before contributing to Deal as well, dismissed the politics. But he does have hopes that if it’s done right, the project is so visible it could be an argument to voters for another run at a T-SPLOST.

“There’s a psychological edge that having a successful project delivers,” he said. “If you look at where jobs are being generated right now and where companies are, where growth seems to be occurring, this is certainly as worthy a place as anywhere. We’ve got limited dollars, and we need to make some big wins.”