Gridlock Guy: ATL DOT asks to please pardon its progress

When something affects someone’s daily commute, said commuter can get righteously indignant. They may proverbially shake their fist and curse other drivers for stopping or crashing (or existing), or they may chide the government for blocking lanes at just the wrong time.

The city of Atlanta wants all drivers to know that the it is as busy as it has ever been and aims to not just fix roads, but make them safer and more efficient for commuters of all kinds.

Two projects on extremely busy corridors — Howell Mill Road and Boulevard — highlight the roughly 50 plans on the Atlanta Department of Transportation’sSafe Streets initiative.

The idea behind Safe Streets is to make the environment not just safer for drivers, but also for cyclists and pedestrians. Atlanta joins cities worldwide in the Vision Zero initiative and is aiming to eliminate all road fatalities in the city limits by 2040.

That does not happen by accident.

A complete street, which is the moniker used for many ticket items on the Safe Streets list, is one that has the design and technology to serve all kinds of commuters in multiple phases.

“We launched our strategic program back in 2024 (in) April and that included strategies that address signalization, safer intersections, traffic signals — how we can allow pedestrians to move before cars do,” ATL DOT commissioner Solomon Caviness told 11Alive and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Improvements include bike lanes, islands for pedestrians to cross more safely and even more vibrant and aesthetic signage, Caviness said.

The Howell Mill project, which improves the highly used and congested stretch between Collier Road (north of I-75) and Marietta Street (south of I-75) in West Midtown, is one of these complete streets projects. It has been on the drawing board for years and has made painstaking progress, as engineers have had to tweak designs.

But the reconfiguration of this tricky corridor is nearing the finish line. “On a business corridor, or one that connects (the) local community to a business district, (it has) higher volumes of traffic and you may have higher speeds, and we want to slow people down,” Caviness explained.

So, improving safety in a mixed-speed corridor like this is tough, but traffic lights can help.

“Traffic signals have been a mechanism or instrument for us to communicate with vehicles to get feedback from vehicles,” he said.

And the city also works with the state to use artificial intelligence systems in these smarter corridors to move traffic and people more efficiently. “There’s predictive analytics when we think about AI and how you use the data where we can anticipate or evaluate crashes,” Caviness said. This helps engineers program signals and design roads to be more safe for everyone, he said.

Caviness joined Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and other dignitaries at a ceremonial groundbreaking for a similar project along Boulevard, from just north of I-20 down to McDonough Boulevard.

This area has seen a development boom more recently than has Howell Mill, but the news conference took place adjacent to a newish mixed-use property. None of that was there some 23 years ago, Dickens said, when he opened his first business across the street.

“This place means something to me,” Dickens said, just days before his reelection. Armed with a chemical engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a master’s in public education from Georgia State University, Dickens knows both the importance of scientific design, operational efficiency and, maybe most importantly, public communication on projects such as these.

At the Boulevard event, Dickens noted how citizens get mad when traffic does not move well or is unsafe, but that they also complain when lanes are blocked to rebuild roads or lanes are taken away to accommodate more bicycles and pedestrians.

In other words, people only want two things: change and for things to remain the same.

But Dickens noted the extreme amount of change he has seen — more than ever, in fact. “I’ve lived in this city for 51 years, and I have never seen this many construction projects.”

But Dickens and Caviness agreed that keeping as much traffic moving as quickly as possible is a major goal in any project. “And we’re doing it, while staying mindful of Atlanta’s residents and businesses to not cause a lot of disruption. Our teams have and will continue to work to keep traffic moving,” Dickens said.

The Boulevard project, like Howell Mill, has been delayed for several years for multiple reasons. But the safety improvements are set to be complete by September, ATL DOT said.

Caviness moved to Atlanta from New York City and said that one of the biggest challenges is getting all of the metro area commuting bodies on the same page. And he noted the disconnect between the people that actually live in Atlanta and the much larger number of people that use the city’s streets.

People are going to have to understand both the plan and the needs of each other — in cars, on foot, on bikes and in homes and businesses.

Caviness said, “One thing we are coming to realize here in Atlanta is that the metro and the city are connected and it’s really important that we think about investment — think about our decision-making as a connected environment.”

Doug Turnbull covers the traffic/transportation beat for WXIA-TV (11Alive). His reports appear on the 11Alive Morning News from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and on 11alive.com. Email Doug at dturnbull@11alive.com.