2020 Georgia Urban Area Populations from US Census Bureau

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by chiatldal

In fact Northeast Georgia, from Gainesville, Athens, to Forsyth need to improve infrastructure at first I was against the idea of freeway etc out that far. But Athens and Gainesville are sort of like Atlanta version of the inland Empire. Which is Riverside/San Bernardino metro area relation to LA. The Georgia piedmont region is mostly one CSA area. There No freeway even going into Athens.

That’s an excellent point about Athens and Gainesville sort of being to Atlanta what the Inland Empire is to Los Angeles in Southern California.

Your comments about the need to improve infrastructure in the Athens to Gainesville to Forsyth County corridor and about the current lack of a freeway connection between metro Atlanta and Athens also raises the point that Georgia State Route 316 is gradually being upgraded to a freeway between Lawrenceville and Athens over about the next decade or so.

While a surface route like US-129 was recently upgraded from a 2-lane roadway to a 4-lane divided highway between Athens and Gainesville by way of the Jefferson area as part of Georgia state government’s GRIP (Governor’s Road Improvement Program) initiative to improve the economy in both the state’s rural areas and in the state’s smaller urban areas by improving the state’s rural road system.

The upgraded 4-lane divided US-129 highway gets much use by freight truck traffic traveling between the very significant hub of industrial development in the Gainesville area and the I-85 corridor through Northeast Georgia which connects to the lucrative markets of the Carolina Piedmont and the Northeastern US Megalopolis.

Meanwhile, in Forsyth County, GDOT recently expanded GA-141 through the southern part of the county and continues to expand and upgrade state-owned routes like GA-20 and the GA-400 freeway that run through the county.

And Forsyth County government has its own ongoing long-term surface road expansion program to upgrade and expand numerous busy county-owned routes like Bethelview Road, Castleberry Road, Old Atlanta Road, Ronald Reagan Parkway, McFarland Parkway, Union Hill Road/Mullinax Road, Mathis Airport Parkway/Windermere Parkway, etc.

There may not necessarily be one big blockbuster project (like an Outer Perimeter Highway) being built to improve transportation infrastructure through the aforementioned swath of outer-suburban and exurban Northeast Georgia, but there are numerous smaller but still highly impactful projects going on throughout the area.