Lexington Road sees upwards of 10,000 cars per day, but when it comes to improvements to the busy corridor, ACC officials and some residents are focused not on cars, but on pedestrians and bicycles. WUGA’s Mary Ryan Howarth has more.
A handful of people living near the busy corridor showed up for an open house about future improvements, hosted by Athens-Clarke County officials. Many of those residents were talking about safety and walkability.
Mateo Fennell lives on Cherokee Rd. and calls himself a “commuter on foot.”
FENNELL: “Chicken trucks are my worst nightmare on a rainy morning. They smell awful and fling chicken juice at me. So it's really nice to think that there might be sidewalk that connects all the way down at some point.” (00:27)
Daniel Sizemore, the ACC Transportation Department’s Bicycle-Pedestrian Safety Coordinator, is an assigned “subject matter expert” for this project.
He said that as development in Athens has expanded, so have “stroads” - his word for something that’s not quite a street and not quite a road.
SIZEMORE: “When you think of neighborhood street,... really its slow speeds, it’s safe for residents to cross the street, or walk in the street, versus a road... that kind of like high-speed, efficient point A to point B.”
Lexington Road is an example, he says.
SIZEMORE: “You don't want stroads because that’s when they're trying to combine streets and roads, and the exact idea of what a stroad is, is Atlanta Highway, West Broad Street, and Lexington Road.”
The Mayor & Commission is set to vote on this project on September 3rd, but questions remain about how the project will be funded. The money for improvements comes from two different rounds of TSPLOST, a one percent sales tax in the county, based on different TSPLOST projects from 2018 and 2023.
District 8 Commissioner Carol Myers came to the open house to specifically ask about the various funding going into improvements in the corridor.
MYERS: “The complicated thing about this is that there’s different funding sources for different parts of it.”
A survey is open on the Athens-Clarke County website through Aug. 11 where residents can submit feedback on the project. The potential pedestrian and bike improvements are just part of a sweeping overhaul to Lexington Road, which is also undergoing construction by the Georgia Department of Transportation near the Loop 10 interchange.
