The Georgia Department of Transportation wants to implement a simple solution to a complicated interchange in Buckhead, the point where I-75’s exit ramp, Mount Paran Road and U.S. 41 meet.
Members of the Buckhead Council of Neighborhood have their own ideas. And they’re concerned.
Chairman Jim King noted after a recent council meeting that in the next two years there will be a new North Atlanta High School on U.S. 41. That will mean high school students will be driving cars to school and trying to navigate a traffic even their parents find complicated.
“Drivers usually get better with age,” King said.
When the council and GDOT representatives met on Dec. 8, the room split into several different conversations about how best to alleviate traffic heading in four different directions at one spot. GDOT’s plan calls for placing a concrete median that would force drivers onto U.S. 41 north from the I-75 south exit ramp. There will also be an additional lane added to the exit ramp for southbound traffic on to Mt. Paran.
GDOT officials called it a quick fix, a Band-Aid until funding becomes available for a better solution.
“The Band-Aid is to reduce weaving from four conflicting maneuvers to three maneuvers,” engineer Paul DeNard told the group.
One of the more prominent alternatives suggested by some council members was to close the Mount Paran exit and force drivers to use the Cumberland Boulevard exit instead.
The council didn’t adopt an official position however. Bryant Poole, a district engineer for GDOT, said the project could be ready to go to bid by this summer. Sue Anne Decker, project manager for GDOT, said the construction would cost about $800,000.
Also at the Dec. 8 meeting, Atlanta City Councilwoman Yolanda Adrean encouraged parents to attend a meeting Dec. 12 at 9a.m. when the council and the Atlanta School Board will discuss school rezoning proposals. The plans have upset many parents. City Council members have also expressed concerns.
“We’ve been hearing from neighborhoods that are quite upset about the chatter about moving neighborhoods and it particularly affects people in the southern part of [council] Districts 7 and 8,” Adrean said.
Robert Boyanovsky and Peter Wurm, two parents of children at Sarah Smith Elementary, came to the BCN meeting to ask questions about the redistricting proposal’s suggestion that students in the Pine Hills neighborhood would attend Garden Hills Elementary instead of Sarah Smith. Both parents said they didn’t understand concerns about capacity problems at Sarah Smith.
Boyanovsky pointed to numbers showing Sarah Smith’s enrollment is projected to decline in 2016.
“Why are they rezoning us out of this school that doesn’t have a long-term capacity constraint?” Boyanovsky asked.
Wurm said parents were surprised when they heard about the school board’s plans.
“This kind of came up all of a sudden,” he said. “We were blindsided.”
