To collect her son from a day care center in west Cobb County, Loressa Copeland must navigate a network of twisting and congested roads from her job near Ga. 400. She's hoping a new highway -- an extension of Windy Hill Road into west Cobb -- will ease that lengthy commute.
When it opens Aug. 10, the roadway will carve a straight, four-lane path from I-75, possibly shaving minutes from Copeland's trip.
Windy Hill, which currently ends at Austell Road, will increase by 2.2 miles with the extension. The county Department of Transportation has projected within a year that 22,700 vehicles will travel the new highway daily.
This part of the county was once rural, and the web of two-lane roads sufficed. Booming development changed that.
West Cobb residents who want to get to I-75 have faced a tangle of streets that wasn't designed for big-city traffic. Everyone pieces together their own zigzag routes. Rush hour turns back-country crossroads into knotty intersections.
"It's a congestion nightmare," said Deb Isgro, another mother who fights traffic to reach the Primrose School at Macland Pointe, the day care facility Copeland uses.
Isgro has tried several routes, including a mix of surface streets and interstates, to get there from her job in Buckhead. She remains skeptical the new highway will affect her commute.
"I hope they prove me wrong," she said.
Officials say the Windy Hill Road extension, with new signal lights and turn lanes, has been a project several years in the making.
"It's been under consideration for longer than I've been here, and I've been here 14 years," said Michael Wright, the Cobb transportation engineer who managed the effort. "It may not be the biggest, but it's one of them, I'd say, going back to the early 90s."
The highway extension cost $27.9 million, an increase from the $23 million originally budgeted. The money came from a sales tax approved by voters in 2005. Another sales tax, approved this year, will pay for improvements along Windy Hill near I-75, to address growing traffic from the interstate exit, Wright said.
The new highway cuts across county-owned forests and fields, and through neighborhoods. A tire store, 25 homes and 76 mobile homes had to be demolished, Wright said.
Residents such as Reggie Womack, whose house used to sit on a small side street, now live next to a limited-access highway. Womack could toss a rock from his porch onto the Windy Hill extension. The highway bisected his street, Greenridge Drive, leaving a cul de sac at the severed end.
Womack prefers living on a dead-end street; his three boys can play without fear of traffic. Yet he worries what could happen once the highway opens, envisioning the worst-case scenario of a speeding car flipping into his home.
"Somebody gets to drinking and they could go right off the road," Womack said.
Macland Station residents didn't want the new road near their homes. Parents of children at Milford Elementary School, which abuts the new highway, complained about the proximity of the highway to the school. The county tried to placate critics, building a wall and a fence between the road and the school, and moving the route farther from the Macland Station neighborhood.
Andrew Kegler, who lives in Macland Station, said his neighbors organized several meetings with road planners, and consequently the new road won't affect them.
"We had a chance to air our concerns and apparently they listened," Kegler said.
Maxine Walker is among those who are happy about the highway extension. Commuters have used her narrow street as a detour from traffic on Callaway Road, zipping past her driveway when she's trying to back out, and that should stop.
"I think the benefit would be that it will curtail people cutting through the neighborhood," Walker said.
Wright, the traffic engineer, said drivers who don't plan to use Windy Hill Road will notice less congestion elsewhere, with the new artery drawing traffic from other streets.
"Even though they won't be using the new road, they'll benefit from it," Wright said.
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