New intersection planned for Wynnton Road

Ground breaks this spring for new road crossing Midtown corridor

By Frank Etheridge
Columbus Community News

As district engineer for the Georgia Department on Transportation for nearly five years, Thomas Howell has during that span increasingly heard reference to what he calls an industry buzz word: “context-sensitive design.”
Essentially, context-sensitive design refers to an approach in engineering road projects with more than just the goal of creating the biggest, fastest, safest road that serves only the automobile and its driver. The new concept takes into account how road projects can preserve, and even promote, the community surrounding that road.
“It’s a national trend, one relatively new to Georgia,” Howell, whose district covers 31 counties, including Muscogee, said of projects incorporating context-sensitive design.
Physical evidence of that new philosophy will be on display this spring when the GDOT breaks ground on a project at the intersection of Wynnton Road and Peacock and Brown avenues. The final design for the project, which is expected to last nine to 12 months and cost $1.4 million in state and federal funding, will directly align Peacock and Brown avenues, a correction from its current zigzag intersection that is a safety concern for city and GDOT officials. (A GDOT survey found the intersection had during a five-year span in the 1990s a 52 percent greater rate of accidents than similar intersections in Georgia.) The alignment of Brown and Peacock will also better accommodate increased vehicular traffic on Wynnton Road.
However, the final design is a far cry from the first draft of plans for the project. Years of negotiation led to a compromise that suits not only the road’s needs, but also fits the vision of a bright future for the Wynnton area as well. The width of the proposed intersection and speed limits were reduced from initial designs. Plus, the project ultimately will feature stamped-brick crosswalks at the intersection to promote pedestrian usage, underground utilities, five-foot sidewalks, landscaping and black aluminum lamp posts for traffic and and street lights, similar to those found in the Uptown business district.
“We’ve reached a great compromise,” said Teresa Tomlinson, executive director of Midtown, Inc., a group that advocates the area’s interests. “What we were looking at was an intersection for an industrial park — right in the middle of historic Wynnton. [The final design] is more in line with the idea of using roads to building communities, not tear them down.”
“I think it’s a good compromise,” said Howell. “It takes care of the needs of the project — to make one intersection there, to provide for better safety. But it also fits into a vision of the community for that area. It just comes down to striking a balance everyone can live with.”

MIDDLE MAN. Both sides of the negotiation process credit Sam Wellborn, retired president of Columbus Bank & Trust, as crucial to setting up talks between community groups and the GDOT that ultimately led to the compromise. Wellborn serves on the GDOT board and is a resident of Midtown.
“My role was very simple: putting the parties together, making sure everybody was working together,” Wellborn said.
“I also got [GDOT Commissioner Harold Linnenkohl] down here personally,” Wellborn said. “He certainly doesn’t look at every project in the state.”
Wellborn said he and Linnenkohl, who has served as the GDOT commissioner for more than two years, sat across the street from the service station and watched traffic, at one point watching a fire truck forced to navigate the zigzag that is Peacock, Brown and Wynnton. At that point, Linnenkohl deemed the project a safety project, and thus state and federal funding would be used.
“He took a real hard look at it and agreed to help us,” Wellborn said of Linnenkohl.
Clearly, Linnenkohl’s leadership helped broker an agreement in negotiations that Tomlinson described at one point as “acrimonious and obstructionist.” Community groups took special aim at the GDOT assertion that its initial plans for expansion would have “no adverse effect” on Wynnton. In response, a group led by Tomlinson, called the Historic Wynnton Council, hired esteemed engineer and community planning expert Ian Lockwood. In his concluding report, Lockwood wrote of the original design, “In my professional opinion … this project is insufficient and remarkably biased against the historic community and in favor of increased motor vehicle traffic only.”
“The first design, to me it was overkill,” Wellborn said. “It was too big, too massive for the circumstance.”
Wellborn’s impression of the agreed upon final design?
“Fantastic,” he said.
“It’s a good example of what can happen when everybody works together,” Wellborn continued. “It’s a marvelous solution to that intersection, which is important to Midtown and the Wynnton area. It was a project that was on the books for many, many years. You have to give thanks to [Tomlinson] for her insight into what ought to really be considered the amenities of the project. And thanks to the DOT for bending a bit from their norm. It all came together to everybody’s satisfaction.”
Beyond just the inherit virtues of compromise, there are other lessons to be learned from the years-long process that led to final design for the intersection of Peacock, Brown and Wynnton, according to Tomlinson.
Opposition to the initial plans voiced to former Councilman Nathan Suber led him, during a July 2002 council meeting, to put the brakes on the project in favor of further review. Suber was also instrumental in blocking plans for a massive widening of Buena Vista Road in Midtown.
At the time, survey and census data showed explosive growth in north Columbus while Midtown experienced stagnation. In response, traffic plans called for major expansions of cross-town routes such as Wynnton, Buena Vista and 13th Street to facilitate vehicular traffic between the outer areas of Muscogee County and downtown, with little heed given to the impact those abandoned projects would potentially have had on historic Midtown neighborhoods. Yet, in each instance public outcry shaped, or stopped completely, those plans. This feat stands in stark contrast to earlier times when road projects were more the province of engineers than politicians, and public input had less impact on the scope and shape of a project.
Looking toward the future, Tomlinson is confident that the upcoming Wynnton project will help, not hurt, that area of Midtown.
“This is just one part in the process for a 25-year plan,” Tomlinson said. “While it might look less than ideal right now, this area has good infrastructure. It’s quite ripe for economic renewal, and this project is going to help bring that about.”