The Medlock Area Neighborhood Association website has an excellent, extensive summary of the North Decatur Road Safety Audit presentation last week.  Cutting to the chase, here are the audit’s official recommendations…

1) a complete street conversion (“road diet”) to reduce North Decatur Road from 4 lanes to 3, by creating a center turn lane and bike lanes. Study of this option suggested.
2) create a multi-use trail to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists
3) widen the street to create a “complete street boulevard” (which includes 2 traffic lanes and a center turn lane, dedicated bike lanes on each side, and dedicated pedestrian sidewalk on each side)

But of course, funds are limited…

…the County’s resources are limited for doing necessary improvements. For example, the County has ~2,000 miles of roads but, with a $120 million resurfacing shortfall, the budget only allowed for the resurfacing of 35 miles of roads. Patrece added that road maintenance is HOST based, so, the County splits available funds with its cities.

That said, neighborhood representatives seem encouraged by the County’s willingness to address and consider these issues and there are a number of less expensive work-arounds that are mentioned throughout the post that seem much more likely to become reality.

Map courtesy of MANA from the DeKalb 2014 Transportation Plan – which deserves it’s own separate post at some point!