Drivers on Ga. 400 will have a little more shoulder room starting Monday morning.
The Georgia Department of Transportation will open five more miles of “flex shoulders” — the side lanes normally restricted to emergency vehicles that transform into traffic lanes during rush hour. That’s 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays.
Commuters traveling on Ga. 400 northbound will have four additional miles of flex-shoulder lanes from Abernathy Road to the North Springs MARTA station; from the station to Northridge Road; and from Ga.120/Old Milton Parkway to Windward Parkway. Ga. 400 southbound will add one mile of shoulder lane starting at the North Springs MARTA station and ending at Abernathy.
The $850,000 project is “one of our relatively low cost/quick turnaround operational strategies,” said GDOT Metro District Engineer Kathy Zahul in a statement.
The more than 170,000 people who alternately speed or crawl on Ga. 400 everyday know the traffic out there can turn on them in an instant. These flex shoulder lanes are designed to alleviate the chronic congestion in both directions, says GDOT.
But not everyone thinks they will work.
Nichole Roche knows Ga. 400’s split personality. She drives it every morning from her Buckhead apartment to her office at Perimeter Center — a commute of about 20 minutes most days. After a long day at work, however, her drive back home can range anywhere from 35 minutes to an hour.
“On the way home, it’s really trafficky until I get past 285,” said Roche, an attorney at Kuman, Prabhu, Patel & Banerjee, LLC.
The new shoulder lanes may not be much help to people who aren’t leaving 400 to get onto I-285, she said.
“I feel like that will be helpful for people getting on to 285, maybe that’ll clear up a little bit, but they have those exit-only lanes, so I don’t see how that will be helpful there,” Roche said. “The problem is just the traffic in Atlanta.”
Other drivers complain that the lanes work well enough until they end, creating a bottleneck of traffic in which drivers may or may not cooperate with one another as the highway loses a lane.
The flex shoulder lanes first opened in 2012 on Ga. 400 southbound.
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