Heads up, drivers: Those hitting the road this weekend — a particularly busy Mother’s Day weekend in metro Atlanta — could face exceptional traffic snarls.
All lanes of the interstate will be shut down Friday night into Monday morning south of I-20, rerouting traffic onto the Downtown Connector and into the city, Georgia Department of Transportation officials announced.
“This is a full interstate closure on one of metro Atlanta’s most heavily traveled corridors,” GDOT said in the news release, adding that it will have “significant impacts on travel throughout the metro area.”
The closure will stretch from Cascade Road at Exit 7 up to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive at Exit 9 in Fulton County. Northbound motorists will be routed to Langford Parkway to take I-75/I-85 up to I-20 and then back over to I-285, and southbound travelers will take the same detour in the other direction.
This weekend also happens to have several events taking place around the city.
The Savannah Bananas will be playing at Truist Park on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Atlanta United is playing a match at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Saturday night.
It’s also Mother’s Day weekend, which coincides with several metro area commencement ceremonies.
Georgia Tech’s ceremony for master’s graduates is Saturday morning in Atlanta; Mercer University grads will be at Gas South Arena in Duluth on Saturday afternoon; and Emory has several commencement events in the mornings Saturday and Sunday in Duluth and near the campus.
Although the events are not located near the I-285 closure, motorists traveling to and from will likely feel effects of the disruption as the traffic reroutes.
GDOT spokesperson Natalie Dale said in an email that the agency aims to “balance impactful closures when possible” with the large number of events taking place any given weekend in the city.
“It is a complex task to thread the needle through these unending events to be able to accomplish the amount of work needed to rebuild 18 miles of a major interstate,” Dale said.
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
Crews will be doing construction to rebuild this segment of the highway from 7 p.m. Friday night until 5 a.m. Monday morning. Freight vehicles need to use the detour route, which allows them to use the Downtown Connector without penalty, Dale said in an email.
Highway drivers will be most heavily affected, but those on side streets in Atlanta and southwest Fulton County will also likely see “spillover traffic,” GDOT said.
The work is part of the I-285 westside reconstruction project. Crews need the interstate completely closed to provide enough workspace for heavy equipment. Workers will “mill and grind existing concrete pavement” and “prepare for slab repair and replacement,” GDOT said in the news release.
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