It was a sight to behold! Thursday afternoon in Atlanta a tractor trailer carrying particle board overturned on the 285 southbound exit ramp from I-20 eastbound on the west side of town. The tractor flipped over. The trailer literally exploded blowing chunks of board and other debris across 285 below the overpass and shutting down the ramp. Within about 15 minutes traffic backed up over 11 miles on 285 all the way past the Cobb Cloverleaf! Over 11 miles! Vehicles on I-20 eastbound came to a stop near 6 Flags.
This happened about 3:00 P.M. Thursday. At 3:50 P.M. the people at the scene gave “notice to proceed” as a TRIP event. 61 minutes later all lanes on 285 and the exit ramp were re-opened! Simply amazing. And your tax dollars at work! TRIP stands for “Towing Recovery Incentive Program.” It’s a program from the Traffic Incident Management Enhancement (TIME) Task Force funded through a grant from the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA). It trains and certifies tow truck operators in quick clearance and provides a cash bonus for their efforts. Had there been no TRIP program it would have taken hours to clear that interchange. And though the delays on 285 were substantial the “TIME” it took to take your TRIP home Thursday afternoon was substantially reduced. And that’s your bonus!
Archive for March, 2009
photo by David Cogswell
Well Mother nature finally managed to reach out and slap us, hitting the region with between 2 and 5 inches of snow Sunday after a Saturday that saw the mercury hovering near 70! What?!? And, overall, we did pretty good. Putdown your cellphone and pat yourself on the back. And thank your deity it happened on a Sunday. We were also fortunate that it didn’t drop below freezing until three a.m giving the wind plenty of time to blow dry the roads. Although there were thousands of little patches of ice everywhere. The DoT advised everyone not to head out this morning until the sun came up so we could see better where the black ice was biting. But I had to laugh when I saw that, in the pre-dawn darkness, even with the DoT’s warning, traffic was averaging 80 miles per hour on I-75 northbound coming up from Clayton County headed for the downtown connector! Atlanta may be the city “too busy to hate” but it’s also the city “too busy to slow down”!
