Downtown Connector - History

History

The Downtown Connector had its origins in the city's original system of expressways, construction of which began in the early 1950s with the Northeast Expressway and the South Expressway. Construction of the "connector" between the two, which was numbered State Route 295, and was slated to carry U.S. Route 19 and U.S. Route 41 at one point, was not completed until the early 1960s. Initial construction of the highway displaced parts of Techwood Drive and Williams Street in Midtown Atlanta and destroyed much of the grid of streets immediately south of downtown. The proposed Interstate 485 was originally planned by the Georgia Department of Transportation to carry some north-south traffic through the eastern side of the city, but most of this was canceled in the 1970s by the then-governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter (Parts of that road are now Interstate 675 and Georgia 400).

The highway was heavily reconstructed during the 1980s as part of the Georgia DOT's Freeing the Freeways program to widen Atlanta-area freeways, with most of the Connector's width being doubled from three to six or seven lanes in each direction. In addition to the general-purpose lanes, provisions for high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes and dedicated on-ramps at Williams Street, Piedmont Avenue, and Memorial Drive were built, and were subsequently converted to HOV usage in 1996.

Between 2000 and 2004, the six-lane wide 17th Street Bridge was constructed over the Brookwood Interchange, connecting Midtown Atlanta with the then-new Atlantic Station development. In 2008, reconstruction of the 14th Street Bridge took place in order to accommodate increased traffic flow and pedestrian amenities. This work also included the construction of two new off-ramps: a southbound ramp to 10th Street, and a northbound ramp to 17th Street. This work was completed on May 28, 2010.

In early January 2010, a section of the highway between 14th and 17th streets developed an unusual problem dubbed "phantom ice" during a prolonged cold wave that kept temperatures below freezing for several days in the Atlanta region. GDOT engineers believe that heavy rain in previous months raised the water table and caused it to seep upward through joints between lanes, where it subsequently froze. Commuter traffic was stopped briefly on at least two days in order to treat it with deicing materials and inspect the freeway to determine the cause.