Roswell Road and the 120 Loop De Loop

Roswell Road, State Route 120, has morphed over the years from a dirt road to a major thoroughfare. When General Sherman set up headquarters off the Marietta Square in 1864, preparatory to laying siege to Atlanta, he sent his cavalry down the Roswell Road to seize the mills and capture the bridge over the Chattahoochee there.

It took them longer to ride across East Cobb that July than it may take you to drive the same route this summer, but they were on horses. You and I just have to deal with the march of progress, D.O.T. style.

State Route 120 is being widened, getting new bike lanes and medians, while at the same time a new bridge and ramps are rising at the intersection of the state route and the 120 Loop. The grand plan is to allow us all to motor through Cobb more efficiently.

The current reality is a sort of live action video game, where the calming rhythm of daily and weekly errands give way to a road that changes each day, flashing signs telling me NO, and chaos where there once was order. Lanes I traveled for years sit idled, while the lane I took to the Kroger one morning this week has been re-routed by the time I head to  for pizza night.

This surface level confusion shouldn’t be new. Anyone who has lived in the Atlanta metro area for a while knows that we’ll pave over or tear down and rebuild anything that isn’t declared a national landmark quicker than you can say Tom Moreland’s road grader. Plenty of East Cobb “old timers” can remember when ‘Upper’ Roswell Road wasn’t much more than the red clay path across which Sherman’s horsemen cantered in the final days of the Lost Cause.

But now, the suburbs are choking on our own success/excess, and in a region that has never really embraced public transportation, we have to build more lanes and overpasses to accommodate all of the cars, SUVs, and trucks that are the very life’s blood of our mobile world.

If our little patch of paradise was actually designed and built out with pedestrians and bicycles in mind, I could easily walk or pedal to my errands. And while there are actually bike lanes in the DOT’s plan for Roswell Road, anyone who tries to walk or bike any distance around here knows that there will be stretches where your life takes on the terror-stricken role of the old-school video game Frogger.

So each day to my trusty Accord I go, strap in, and head towards the Roswell Road/120 Loop vortex, to see what new mystery or detour the road crews have laid for me today. The good news is that the D.O.T. claims the entire project will be finished by New Year’s Eve 2012.  We’ll have two extra lanes, a bicycle lane, and a five-foot-wide sidewalk. So at least on our area’s busiest thoroughfare, cyclists and pedestrians should be able to live in peace with the thousands of vehicles whizzing past every day.

But that’s in the rosy future. In the dusty, hot mid-summer present, the roads change every day, the ramps on and off the loop present different degrees of difficulty in navigation depending on the week, and the businesses along Roswell Road watch their parking lots and buffers turn into construction zones that drive away customers. 

On the upside, the cost of family entertainment has dropped in my household. Upon returning from camp, we drove our daughter to the market and back. It was a whole new wide-eyed experience for her, the swooping ramps and new turns onto and off of the loop something unknown to her from the previous era; i.e., June. 

The classic cliché about the weather, “if you don’t like it, wait a while and it will change,” now applies equally to the trip across East Cobb. 

Sherman’s Cavalry had it easy.