This afternoon as I was headed home from work, I noticed that the Georgia DOT (GDOT) had reconfigured the far right-hand lane of US 19/GA 400 northbound on the approach to Exits 12A-B (McFarland Parkway) in Forsyth County.

When GDOT opened the new northbound lanes on 400, they configured the far right-hand lane to dump right into 12A (McFarland Parkway East). With today's change, that same lane now dumps traffic into 12B (McFarland Parkway West).

The traffic still "bottlenecks" between Exits 11 (Windward Parkway) and 12A, however, as you approach McFarland from the south. The far left-hand lane still ends at the Fulton/Forsyth County Line, thus forcing all the through traffic into the 2 middle lanes. This, IMHO, needs to be corrected to better facilitate the flow of northbound through traffic heading toward Cumming and Dahlonega. Please click here to see it for yourself on ROADGEEK-CAM!!!

If I were to have designed the lane configuration, I would have done it similar to the new "collector/distributor" (C/D) system GDOT built at Exit 14 (GA 20/Buford/Cumming), with the 2 left-hand lanes as "thru traffic" and the 2 right lanes dumping traffic into a C/D ramp. The traffic in the third lane would not be forced into merging and, in worst case scenario, could just proceed through the C/D ramp and back onto the main traffic flow with minimal interference to normal through traffic.

Better yet, GDOT needs to go ahead and add at least one more lane to each side of 400 all the way to Exit 17 (GA 306/Gainesville). GDOT should have designed 400 as a fully controlled-access Interstate-style highway as was envisioned nearly 50 years ago, for that matter, all the way up to GA 53 in Dawson County. However, I do believe that there are plans to convert 400's intersection with GA 53 to an interchange, but I'm not sure when it will get done. Oh well, I guess we just let development continue to totally run roughshod over the corridor and pay even more money later to fix it. OK, I'll get off my soapbox now.

That's it for now. Thank you for reading and please come back again. Oh yeah... if you got any comments, please feel free to share them.