Future
Since the 1970s, the Georgia Department of Transportation has planned an outer loop, which would be a roughly 230 mile (370 km) circumferential loop around metropolitan Atlanta. Under Governor Sonny Perdue, the plans were dropped from the Regional Transportation Plan, in favor of the expansion of the rural state road network outside of Atlanta. The state still retains ownership of most of the land that would be needed to complete at least the northern section of the Outer Loop, known as the Northern Arc. As of 2007, ideas have been considered to build that highway even further north, through areas that are still rural.
The I-285 and Georgia 400 interchange is slated to be reconfigured with collector/distributor roads along Georgia 400 and a complete full stack interchange that will make it the largest freeway interchange east of Los Angeles. The new interchange is expected to be able to handle around 300,000 cars per day. Feasibility studies have been completed, and it is in Atlanta's 2025 Regional Transportation Plan.
On July 31, 2012, metro-area voters rejected the T-SPLOST comprehensive transportation plan that was to be funded by an additional one-percent sales tax over a ten-year period. Among the projects included in the plan was a new exit on I-285 at Greenbriar Parkway on the southwest side of Atlanta (between present exits 2 & 5), as well as major reconstruction of interchanges at exits 27 (GA 400/US 19), 10 (I-20 west of Atlanta) and 33 (I-285 northeast of Atlanta).
Georgia DOT voted in September 2012 to raise the speed limit from 55 miles per hour (90 km/h) to 65 miles per hour (105 km/h) on the entire freeway, and by 2013 install electronic signs for variable speed limits north of I-20, to lower the speed limit when traffic or weather conditions warrant. This is intended to keep traffic moving at a reduced but steady speed, rather than suddenly-braking drivers causing traffic to "clot" simply because other drivers are also braking (which causes unnecessary stop-and-go traffic).
Read more about this topic: Interstate 285
Famous quotes containing the word future:
“Every member of the family of the future will be a producer of some kind and in some degree. The only one who will have the right of exemption will be the mother ...”
—Ruth C. D. Havens, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.... Leisure contains the future, it is the new horizon.... The prospect then is one of unremitting labor to bequeath to future generations a chance of founding a society of leisure that will overcome the demands and compulsions of productive labor so that time may be devoted to creative activities or simply to pleasure and happiness.”
—Henri Lefebvre (b. 1901)
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again ... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
—J.G. (James Graham)