The newly created traffic impact task force conducted its first meeting earlier this week, hoping to find some solutions to a problem that Mayor Bob Lenox acknowledged is “not going away for a long time.”

The group will meet at 4:30 p.m. each first Monday, with the next meeting set for Dec. 6.

No major decisions were made at the first meeting, which was mainly for organizational purposes. The next meeting should see the members armed with more information and materials to study while assessing the traffic situation.

Data from an ongoing study by traffic engineers Dames and Moore will be available at the next meeting, along with information from the Georgia Department of Transportation concerning the status of the ill-fated road widening project on Ga. Highway 54 West. It is possible that some engineering work had already been done when the federal air regulations shut down the project along with dozens of others in the metro Atlanta area.

But Lenox pointed out that even if the government were more lenient, road building is a lengthy process, with engineering, right of way acquisition and actual construction. “Five years is a rush job,” he said.

Lenox said that Fayette and Coweta counties have officially agreed to the Hwy. 54 corridor being the top road priority in the area right now, a move that he thinks is a good step.

The initial brainstorming session included some discussion of possible options such as extending Crosstown Drive and TDK Boulevard into Coweta County, connecting it with Hwy. 54 and relieving some of the Fayette-Coweta traffic on that route.

Also mentioned were some of the suggestions put forth at a recent City Council meeting by Dames and Moore, such as extending the left turn lane on Ga. Highway 74 at the Hwy. 54 intersection and making the right turn lane a through lane for a few hundred yards.

Traffic in the Hwy. 54 corridor is not just the responsibility of those in the corridor, Lenox said. “It's a city-wide problem.”

The mayor believes that the city is taking huge steps to address it, however. He said that he knows of no other city in Georgia with a traffic model in place such as the one Dames and Moore is putting together.

Questions were raised about the possibility of the task force addressing land-use issues, but Lenox said that nearly all of the land in the city is already set as far as its use. Some time will be devoted in the next meeting to identifying each parcel in the corridor and its status as far as zoning and other issues.

“We'll need to eat this apple one bite at a time,” said Wynnmeade resident John Dillihunt. “We need to see what we can do in the here and now.”

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