Spaghetti Junction ranked worst truck bottleneck in country

DEKALB COUNTY, Ga. — Spaghetti Junction is at the top of a new list rating the worst truck bottlenecks in the country.

“It’s gotten, over the years, worse than it ever has been, and lately it’s really bad. Bottlenecking from Jimmy Carter all the way,” Gwinnett County resident and WSB Traffic Trooper Rich Nourie said.

The I-285/I-85 interchange is one of the busiest morning hot spots for Triple Team Traffic, but it’s not the only one on the list made by the American Transportation Research Institute.

The interchange at I-75 and I-285 north made the list at No. 9 and I-20 at I-285 west came in at No. 15.

Researchers used GPS data from more than 600,000 trucks to calculate costs and lost productivity from congestion nationwide. It added up to $49 billion a year.

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The president of ATRI told Channel 2’s Linda Stouffer that slowdowns in Spaghetti Junction make everything in the truck more expensive for consumers.

“When you look at average speeds that trucks travel through that intersection, at rush hour they drop down to about 25 miles per hour. There's no question that if trucks are operating that slowly, the cars around them are operating that slowly as well, so it's just a very difficult place for trucks to navigate through," Rebecca Brewster said.

The Georgia Department of Transportation says the top end of the perimeter and I-20 interchanges are all on a list for major re-dos to be started in the next 10 years.

“You lose a lot of productivity sitting there doing nothing,” Nourie said.

Cox Media Group