With a snip of an giant pair of scissors, Mayor Eva Galambos on Oct. 30 cut a piece of red ribbon hung between two orange traffic pylons and formally opened the widened Roswell Road bridge across I-285.
“Finally, after years of trying to get this project done, we have a new lane,” she said.
Galambos was accompanied at the ribbon-cutting by members of Sandy Springs City Council and Georgia Department of Transportation official Brandon Beach. Afterwards, the mayor said the widening of the bridge was one of the first projects city officials asked DOT officials to undertake after the city was formed nearly seven years ago.
“This is a tremendous improvem
ent because we have removed a bottleneck,” Galambos said. “We still have a lot of traffic, but at least we’ve removed the bottleneck.”
The $4 million project widened the bridge by a lane. That allowed the creation of a pair of designated left turn lanes for traffic going in both directions across the bridge. Prior to the widening, cars using the bridge’s single central left turn lane backed up into adjacent lanes, blocking other cars and stopping them from crossing the bridge.
Galambos predicted the project would help speed up traffic on Roswell Road. “I’ve already seen it,” she said. “It’s been open about 10 days and we’ve already noticed a difference.”