In December of 2025, during the Smyrna City Committee of the Whole Agenda meeting, Croy Engineering submitted their quarterly update of their projects. Croy Engineering is the firm behind the Windy Hill Rd Improvement project as well as many others in the southeast. In this meeting, they showed, among other things, a plan for a South Cobb Drive improvements between Concord Road and Windy Hill Rd. And this plan is a mixed bag to be sure.
The plan’s main feature is adding in medians, wide 12 foot multiuse trails on either side, and local lanes on either side of the road, with a center “fast lane”. South Cobb Drive is filled with people walking across all sections of the road and has resulted in many deaths, injuries, and car crashes over the years. It’s a pretty typical stroad (click here if you don’t know what that is), with lots of local traffic, homes, and destinations mixed in with high vehicle speeds. It’s current layout is the seeming standard of five lanes: two travel lanes in either direction with a middle turn lane. And lots of drive ways coming in and out.
The new plan has a middle section, also with two travel lanes in either direction, but with a median in the middle that occasionally gives way to a turn lane, then an additional two lanes on the outside that are only for local traffic. Then outside of those local lanes there are 12 foot wide multiuse trails.
The Good
Those multiuse trails are nice and wide, and this is an area with more foot traffic than you’d expect. The medians provide an additional place for people crossing the street to rest and only have to check one side at a time. The local lanes will have slower speeds and the multiuse trails have a buffer with street lights between them and the local lanes so these will be much safer to be on and probably more pleasant overall. The local lanes also provide much more opportunity for future development, such as zoning more buildings close to the local lane. And these improvements include traffic signal improvement which is long overdue.
The Bad
The biggest issue we see with these improvements is just how over engineered and expensive the whole thing is. It’s also HUGE, the corridor is currently between 90 and 140 feet from sidewalk to sidewalk. These new sections would increase that to 170 feet the whole way down.
Another big issue is that, if you are driving in the local lane and need to turn left onto Windy Hill, you have to cross over three lanes of high speed traffic. This is a major issue on the new Windy Hill Road corridor.
Bus stops will be on the local lanes which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in order for this to work as well as possible, there needs to be signal priority for the buses and there’s nothing in the plan that mentions that.
And, as of right now, building something near the new multiuse trail is basically impossible despite there being a huge economic incentive to do so, due to zoning laws and offset requirements. Which means that it will be a nice wide sidewalk completely open to the elements and those walking still have to go across a giant parking lot to get to anywhere.
The Ugly
This project is mostly funded but still shy by about $8 million and in the best case scenario won’t get started breaking ground until 2028. There are much cheaper temporary solutions that could be put in place right now to at the very least result in lower pedestrian deaths. Anywhere there’s a bus stop there should, if nothing else, be a median so people getting off the bus can cross the street. Bonus points if it’s also a bump out to help slow down traffic.
And, probably the ugliest part of all of this is that the measurements in this graph are misleading. These lanes are 11 feet from paint to paint, but the gutter here is a foot before the curb starts, so the lane is really more like 12 feet, which is also what an interstate lane is. Also, this makes it seem like the median is going to have lots of foliage which stops people from crossing outside of marked crosswalks which is a recipe for people just destroying the foliage instead of walking a full mile to get to a crosswalk.
And speaking of misleading, look at this image
This is presented as a concept of what South Cobb will look like, but there are several things in this that aren’t in the actual plan, including
- On street parking
- Benches and sidewalks on the median between the local street and the center road
- Bikes and cars sharing the local road
- Trees on every median (the plan seems to show bushes)
- Mid block crossing
And of course, while this is outside of what the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) can do, there are buildings only 15-20 or so feet away from the local road, not the 60+ feet that it would be in reality.
Ideas for improvement
Based on other similar roads, we have several ideas for how this project could be improved.
- Bus shelters and benches at every stop
- Dedicated lanes with bus shelters on the center median or at least signal priority on the local lanes
- Remove all slip lanes from plan
- Add marked crosswalk to every driveway
- Add dedicated pedestrian crossings, especially at bus stops
- Add LPI (Leading pedestrian intervals) at every crosswalk.
Final thoughts
This improvement plan is a mixed bag. It’s way too wide, expensive, and still encourages high speeds. But it also creates some strong pedestrian infrastructure, will make crossing safer, and has the potential to support better zoning and bus schedules.
There’s going to be a public information open house on Thursday, March 19th to discuss this project with the City of Smyrna and the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT). I will be there along with many other members of A Better Cobb and if you’re reading this before then, I’d love to see you there. And if you’re reading this after, I’m sure we’ll have lots of thoughts that we put into another article that will be linked in this article.
The only way we can make our communities better is if we make our concerns known and present legitimate suggestions to encourage good development instead of just shooting down projects that aren’t perfect. We also need to encourage more development that actually reduces traffic by reducing the number of trips taken by car, instead of just making car traffic flow smoother. This project isn’t perfect but it does represent that GDOT and the city of Smyrna recognize the issues facing their communities, and as members of the community, we need to share our insights and perspective to ensure that Cobb County becomes an even better place to live.
