Every town has that ONE road.
It didn’t take me long to figure out Walnut Avenue is that ONE road in Dalton.
If you’re coming off Thornton Avenue and trying to get to the interstate, you better be patient. Because at peak rush hour, you’re going to be doing a LOT of waiting.
The set-up of the road is pretty weird. There’s a lot of intersecting roads that run right through Walnut Avenue, which makes congestion, I don’t know, three or four times worse than it probably should be.
If you’re looking for a recipe for traffic bottlenecks, you’ve found an award winner right here.
OK, so long roads with a bunch of intersecting roads slicing through it isn’t that atypical. But what makes Walnut Avenue a different kind of beast is twofold.
First off, both sides of the road are pretty narrow. I don’t know how much right of way there is between the roadway itself and the bordering commercial parcels, but it doesn’t look like much. Heck, you could probably stick your arm out the driver’s side window and pick up a milkshake anytime you want.
And the other thing that makes Walnut a major pain to navigate are the turn lanes. Remember those intersecting roads I mentioned earlier? Well, pretty much all of them have at least one dedicated turn lane. Factor in those aforementioned narrow lanes, in general, and the inevitable happens — so many cars line up in the turn lanes that they start snaking OUT of the turn lane and into the regular lanes.
It seems to happen all the time around 7 o’clock on Friday nights. It’s especially bad near the Market Street intersection. There, when the turn lane fills up the cars actually start jutting out in sort of a backwards, lower-case j formation. Which means if you’re behind the queue, you’re pretty much boxed in with no chance at escape.
Why “no chance?” Because in the other lane, which is nominally unfettered by the turn lane congestion, motorists are STILL driving about 60 or 70 miles per hour. So your window of opportunity there boils down to microseconds. Is it really worth risking a car wreck to POTENTIALLY get to Olive Garden three seconds earlier than planned? That’s an existential question I ponder virtually every single day now.
Even once you get beyond the Market Street intersection you’re still not out of the proverbial woods here. There’s an I-75 turn lane going south and an I-75 turn lane going north but if you’ve never been up these parts before it’s not immediately clear which one is which. I know this firsthand, because a couple of days ago I watched some fella with a Michigan license plate merge into oncoming traffic on an offramp.
That … might be worth some additional signage, y’all.
But like I said, this kinda thing ain’t exclusive to Dalton. Back in Cartersville, that ONE road was literally the entire downtown area. You see, there’s a CSX line running right through the middle of town and at least two or three times a week, the trains like to take a nap right there on the tracks for three or four hours at a time. Preferably around noon. On a workday.
One time it took me a solid hour to move from the courthouse to the old newspaper office. On foot, it wouldn’t have taken me more than 10 minutes, and that’s AT a leisurely pace.
And even that is a stroll through Mayberry compared to what I went through in Roswell. Anytime you want to complain about traffic being bad, just be thankful you aren’t stuck on Georgia 400. The funny/terrifying thing about that highway is that if you travel north on it far enough, the white lines in the road pretty much disappear altogether. When it starts raining, it becomes virtually impossible to tell which lane you’re supposed to be in. Even weirder, if you go north enough on 400 — I’m talking beyond the exit for Gainesville — the highway STOPS being a highway altogether and turns into a two-lane road, complete with traffic lights.
Talk about a Twilight Zone moment there, folks.
And you don’t even NEED me to tell you how bad traffic in Atlanta is. Whoever thought it was a good idea to merge I-75 and I-85 into ONE downtown connector ought to have his transportation planning credentials revoked retroactively, just to make an example out of him.
So yeah, Walnut Avenue isn’t my favorite spot in the world. And there are times it makes me grit my teeth until I can almost feel the underlying gum tissue. But in the grand scheme of things, I guess the commute could be worse.
After all — there could be a train running right through the middle of it.
James Swift is the managing editor of the Dalton Daily Citizen.