New stadium should mean quicker trips for many Braves fans

Travel times to current and future Braves stadium sites

Starting point/ Travel time to Turner Field/ Travel time to new stadium

Note: Times are freeway travel times only. Not included is the time it takes to get from your door to the freeway entrance and the time it takes to get from the freeway exit to your parking space at the stadium. Those times are presumed to be roughly equal for the old stadium and new stadium.

* Times shown above are weeknight averages between 5:30 and 6 p.m. in 2012.

Source: Georgia Department of Transportation, Traffic Operations

Road projects under development in Cumberland Mall area

Cobb County’s current transportation plan and SPLOST included several projects addressing current and future transportation needs in the vicinity of the proposed stadium site. They include:

Improvements that are unfunded but being studied:

As plans move forward on the proposed Braves ballpark in Cobb County, questions linger about how game-goers will affect the area’s already bottlenecked roads.

But a comparison of trip times to the old and new stadium locations suggests the weeknight drive to the game for the largest share of Braves fans could be the same or even better when the new stadium opens in 2017.

Cobb County officials say it will be months before they can complete a traffic study. So they don’t know what impact the addition of thousands of vehicles — nobody can say how many vehicles typically travel to a Braves game — would have on metro Atlanta’s mobility.

But the Georgia Department of Transportation does know how long it currently takes to get to the proposed stadium site, which is sandwiched between Cobb Parkway, I-285 and I-75 just outside the Perimeter. It also collects information about how long it takes to get to Turner Field now.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained exclusive information from GDOT about average trip times on several routes for the 5:30 to 6 p.m. time window on weekdays, when traffic would be the worst.

The data show that for a lot of fans, driving to the new stadium site on a weeknight could be quicker than driving to Turner Field. Particularly for motorists who live north of the city, where the heaviest concentration of Braves ticket buyers reside.

“That’s actually completely shocking to me,” Lee Adkins of Johns Creek said after learning how the trip times compared for him.

Adkins, who attends a few games a year, said he prefers going downtown to see the Braves, but he is open to trying the new stadium.

“I guess to me going to Cobb County for a Braves game — I don’t love it,” Adkins said. “But I’m not opposed to it.”

The data come with a couple of caveats. For one thing, they don’t account for the time it takes to get from your driveway to the nearest interstate or from the interstate exit to the stadium. Those times aren’t expected to change much for either location.

The trip times also represent the average for weeknights in 2012. That’s particularly important to keep in mind when considering Turner Field trips because the 51 weeknights when the downtown stadium hosted a game last year are a fraction of all those measured.

The comparison shows:

As the Braves’ faithful approach the new stadium site, there are numerous access roads to funnel them in, Cobb DOT Director Faye DiMassimo said.

Besides I-285 and I-75, there is Cobb Parkway, Cumberland Parkway, Powers Ferry Road, Spring Hill Parkway, Spring Road, Terrell Mill Road, Windy Hill Road and Windy Ridge Parkway.

Many of those roads are already bogged down in the evening, presumably because about 76,000 people work in the Cumberland Mall area’s offices and shops.

Scott Struletz, who grew up in Cobb and now lives in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, wasn’t surprised that travel time for Midtown-area residents is about the same for either stadium location. He said traffic near Turner Field is awful. But the tie-ups near the new site are also “terrible.”

He said he’ll be going to fewer games.

“The fact that I don’t have the option of taking public transportation now makes it even worse,” Struletz said.

About 6 percent of fans who came to games in 2013 took MARTA. Transit-dependent people would still be able to take a Cobb County Transit bus from Arts Center station in Midtown to a transfer center at Cumberland Mall.

DiMassimo said the county would seek additional funding to add more buses to that route, as well as shuttles that can ferry people from parking lots to the stadium.

From a transportation planning standpoint, it’s not necessarily problematic or unusual that no traffic study was conducted before the selection of the new ballpark site, said Tim Lomax, a national congestion expert at the Texas Transportation Institute.

Looking at a map of average weeknight speeds on roads near Cumberland Mall, Lomax said they are about what he would expect to find in a big metropolitan region such as Atlanta.

“You can probably figure out the traffic,” Lomax said. “But the sooner you get started, the better.”

Even before the prospect of a stadium in Cobb was a twinkle in the eye of Braves President John Schuerholz, the county’s transportation plan included several projects to alleviate traffic in the vicinity. They include widening lanes and overhauling interchanges on several arterial roads.

Cobb County and the Cumberland Community Improvement District have committed an additional $24 million toward transportation improvements for the new stadium that were not already budgeted. These will include a $3.5 million pedestrian bridge from the Cobb Galleria Center over I-285.

New express toll lanes to be constructed on I-75 by the spring of 2018 should help pull some traffic off the main lanes for that interstate, DiMassimo said.

There are no swift solutions to unclog I-285. The state, however, has plans to build express toll lanes along the 13.1-mile stretch from I-75 North to I-85 North some time between 2020 and 2030.

Also on the county’s wish list for transportation improvements are a dedicated ramp coming from the I-75 express lanes and a bus-rapid transit system with a dedicated bus lane on Cobb Parkway.

But using technology and traffic planning to ease congestion is just as important as adding more pavement, Lomax said. Examples of that can include adding shuttle service from area parking lots, reversing lanes to go in peak directions and retiming traffic signals.

All those ideas are definitely on the table as the county looks ahead, DiMassimo said.

“Our goal,” DiMassimo said, “is to make sure at the first home game in 2017 that everyone will have a successful experience, both arriving at the stadium and leaving the stadium.”