Five roundabouts planned for Highway 44

If you’ve been wondering how Lake Country drivers are going to handle that new roundabout planned for the Highway 44 (Lake Oconee Parkway) and Linger Longer Road intersection, you can multiply that by five.

It’s a long way off. At least six years. But the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) has decided to create four more roundabouts when it widens Highway 44 in Putnam and Greene counties.

The four would be in addition to the previously announced roundabout at Linger Longer Road near Publix. All five would be in a 4.5-mile stretch of the road from Carey Station Road in Greene County to Harmony/ Old Phoenix Road in Putnam County.

New roundabouts are now planned for intersections at Carey Station Road, Merchant Street, Scott Road, and for Harmony Crossing.

Roundabouts replace traffic lights and force drivers at intersections to continue driving counterclockwise in a circle until they exit to the right in whatever direction they are heading.

The decision to expand the number of roundabouts appears to be a concession to the group SaveMy44 which urged GDOT to use more roundabouts, saying they “greatly improve safety, minimize delays and alleviate congestion.”

State Representative Trey Rhodes (R-Dist. 124), whose district includes Greene and Putnam Counties, has spearheaded the talks with GDOT. He pushed for the roundabouts as well as solutions to other concerns from local businesses and community leaders like curb cuts, medians and right-of-way issues.

“I’ve spent more time on this project than anything I have done, cumulative, in my previous eight years and will continue to do so,” Rhodes told the Lake Oconee News Monday.

He spent Tuesday talking to local civic and business groups about Highway 44 four-lane project changes.

“Trey is a good guy,” SaveMy44 board member and realtor Brian Quinn told the Lake Oconee News. “He’s got all our best interests in mind. He’s worked so hard at this and I am so thankful for that.”

Renderings for each of the roundabouts appear on the DOT website.

Other 44 issues

The Harmony roundabout location may be a surprise to some observers. Instead of being located at the Harmony/Phoenix Roads intersection, it will be built about ¼ mile north at the current entrance to the Harmony Crossing shopping area. It gives that development and a new grocery store tentatively planned for construction across Highway 44 easy access from either direction.

That is unlike many businesses that complain new medians constructed for the road widening will make their establishments harder to reach.

The SaveMy44 group supports those businesses’ concerns and is continuing to push for GDOT to create just three lanes, with a center turn lane, instead of widening to four lanes with concrete medians.

But Rhodes disagrees with the group on that.

“That is a good 6-to-8year fix,” Rhodes said, “But we’re already north of $150 million (project cost) and we’re not going to spend that kind of money for a short-term fix. We’re going to fix it for 25 to 30 years.”

Rhodes says his campaign staff discovered that from 2020 to 2022, there were over 4,300 new registered voters and 3,300 new households in the lake areas of Greene and Putnam counties. He favors the project because of the obvious increase in projected traffic.

“We’re going to have four lanes but I want this to be the Lake Oconee ‘resort’ looking four lanes right here through the lake community,” he said. “It’s almost five miles from the pyramid to Carey Station Road. Two-and-a-half miles of that is going to be grass median where Greene and Putnam's counties have already said they’re going to take care of their sections. They can have grass, they can have trees, they can have bushes, whatever they see fit to make it pretty in there. The rest of that is going to turning lanes.

"Some of these turning lanes are going to be 500-600 feet long and as you know in a turning lane, it’s kind of a tapered down concrete. I’ve got DOT committed to stamping that concrete so it looks like stone and won’t look just like concrete. And they’re going to even come back and sod the side of the road.”

Nothing stuck in cement

The full Highway 44 widening project runs 10.5 miles and has now been broken into three pieces. Phase 1 has a construction start date of 2025 and will begin just north of I-20 and run to near King Drive. Phase 2 is scheduled to start in 2026 and run from King Drive to Carey Station Road. Phase 3 has all the roundabouts and runs from Carey Station Road to Harmony/Old Phoenix Roads with a current start date of 2027.

Rhodes says the major holdup in moving forward right now is right-of-way acquisition. There are 222 parcels of land along the route but only 59 have been settled.

The plan to widen Highway 44 is decades old and has changed many times. The GDOT website frequently uses the words “conceptual,” “anticipated” and “proposed” but one line on the website says it all.

“The planning for the SR 44 project corridor has evolved over the past 20 years and will continue throughout the project life cycle.”

Rhodes says there’s still time for other tweaks to the four-lane plan.

“The project is going to be let in 2026, 27 and 28 but that’s going to give us time to adjust within the footprint out here at the lake, as best we can, with new things and new businesses coming,” he said.

Despite having won the roundabouts, Brian Quinn says his SaveMy44 group is not giving up on its push for only three lanes.

“I would say that gives us time to really look closely at this and not just slap a typical four-lane highway in front of all these businesses, especially in Putnam County,” Quinn said. “At the end of the day, we will have a highway that will be as beautiful as the rest of Lake Oconee. It will be a welcome mat for every person coming to our community.”