The End Is Near For Major Road Project Connecting Douglas County To I-20
Construction to re-route State Route 92 in Douglas County has been underway for six years and planning goes back decades.
Emil Moffatt / WABE
The need for more traffic lanes and fewer railroad crossings on State Route 92 in Douglasville isn’t new. Mayor Rochelle Robinson recalls being stuck in traffic, on the north side of town, at a rather precarious moment.
“I was pregnant and I couldn’t get across the tracks – I lived on that side of town at that time – to get to the hospital to deliver my child,” Robinson said.
That was 20 years ago, about the same time engineers started drawing up plans to re-route Highway 92. Six years of construction and more than $100 million later, relief is in sight in the form of a six-lane road, the elimination of two of those railroad crossings and the re-location of a third.
“That dividing track was a bad signature,” said Douglas County commission chair Romona Jackson Jones, who calls the February 2022 scheduled completion date for the project a major milestone.
“We’re now at a point that all of us feel that we have all the same amount of access to amenities and we’ve leveraged something that’s very important to me,” Jones said. “And I didn’t think I’d see this in my lifetime.”
Leaders in Douglas County credit state and federal agencies, and U.S. Rep. David Scott, for their persistence in seeing the project through.
County officials say some 35,000 drivers from Douglas and bordering Paulding County take State Route 92 each day and that number is expected to rise to 50,000 over the next 15 years. About half of those cars, they say, are just trying to get to I-20.
Traffic bottlenecks like these are something lawmakers in Washington, D.C. hope to address through trillions of dollars in infrastructure spending.
Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock toured the decades-long project in Douglasville last weekend.
“When you think about how long it’s taken to get this done, it is illustrative of what happens when we keep saying ‘infrastructure week, infrastructure week’, but have been really slow in getting infrastructure done,” Warnock said.
It’s a problem that drivers in Douglasville know all too well, even as the orange construction barrels along the city’s major thoroughfare are set to disappear soon.
“You will begin to see these investments and the difference it can make,” Warnock said. “The local officials have done a great job, but a project of this magnitude requires federal investments.”
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