GAINESVILLE – The Georgia Department of Transportation has been officially asked to consider remedies for a pair of public safety issues affecting state roads around Gainesville.
The requests were made by Hall County District 4 Commissioner Jeff Stowe who represents the county as a voting member on the Gainesville-Hall Metropolitan Planning Organization’s (GHMPO) Policy Committee.
At Tuesday’s quarterly meeting of the Policy Committee, Stowe asked GDOT representatives in attendance to examine two safety issues he feels need attention.
“I’d like to request to GDOT, to re-evaluate the intersection of (U.S.) 129 and Gaines Mill Road for a red-light, given that there’s been, probably, in the neighborhood of four-to-five hundred homes built in the last year-and-a-half, two years,” Stowe began.
“There’s been another three-hundred that were annexed into the city of Gainesville, and that developer actually put up $50,000 towards a potential red-light at that intersection,” Stowe continued. “And I know since the first of the year…there’s been several bad accidents at that intersection.”
“I’d like staff to formally send a letter to GDOT to look at that,” he added.
The second item of concern Stowe wants brought to GDOT’s attention is the lack of pedestrian space on the Atlanta Highway (SR 13) bridge over Flat Creek. The narrow bridge is about 200-feet south of Atlanta Highway’s intersection with Pearl Nix Parkway.
“That community really walks quite a bit,” Stowe said. “Staff went out and took pictures. There (are) actually no shoulder; it’s just guard rails.”
“I’d like GDOT to look at making some kind of extension to that bridge for pedestrians to be able to get across, because right now women with strollers actually have to get into traffic to cross that bridge.”
When asked after the meeting if the Hall County Commission had officially sought relief from GDOT for either of the two issues he shared, Stowe answered, “We have not actually discussed that in one of our actual meetings. We have discussed it individually. I have talked to all the other commissioners and they were all in favor of that.”
“And since this (GHMPO Policy Committee) is the board that would kind-of oversee that it just made sense to go directly to them…and see what could be done on those two issues.”
