Ga. 400 toll set to come down — but traffic likely to go up | www.myajc.com

A bittersweet victory awaits drivers who finally stop paying the hated 50-cent toll on Ga. 400 next month.

New drivers attracted by the free ride are expected to add up to 18 percent more traffic on the road, according to the State Road and Tollway Authority.

“Oh no,” said Shirica Arnold, 26, a Sandy Springs resident who travels Ga. 400 inside the Perimeter several times a week. “There can’t be more traffic. It can’t be more traffic than it is now.”

There can.

Ga. 400 currently serves about 120,000 drivers each weekday at the toll plaza, according to the State Road and Tollway Authority.

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Work starts next week to begin removal of Ga. 400 toll booths gallery

Work starts next week to begin removal of Ga. 400 toll booths

The estimates for increased traffic range from 10 percent to 18 percent, said Bert Brantley, the tollway authority’s deputy executive director, though the figures are dated and don’t take into account the new ramps that are scheduled to open at I-85.

“It will be interesting to see what the true impact of removing the tolls is versus the what studies say,” Brantley wrote in an e-mail. “While 50 cents does not seem like it would be much of a deterrent to using Ga 400, the high number of customers that preferred to use cash certainly indicates that there is a group of drivers who would potentially avoid the road if they didn’t happen to have two quarters with them at the time.”

The Ga. 400 toll has been a thorn in the side of drivers and a political problem for state leaders. Drivers were outraged in 2010 when then-Gov. Sonny Perdue announced that the toll would remain in place, despite earlier promises that it would be removed once Ga. 400 was paid for.

This is a rendering distributed by the State Road and Tollway Authority in March 2013 of the Ga. 400 toll plaza … read more

Gov. Nathan Deal yielded to the backlash and reversed the decision in 2012. Preliminary work to remove the toll will begin this weekend, and the toll plaza will be demolished next year.

Before the toll officially goes away, tentatively scheduled for late next month, transportation workers will reroute the roadway’s three lanes through the Cruise Card lanes and lower the speed limit to 45 miles per hour near the plazas. Officials say the Cruise Card lanes are wide enough to accommodate three lanes and won’t significantly congest traffic.