Metro Atlanta has three of 10 worst traffic bottlenecks for trucks, study says

ATLANTA — An annual list of worst truck bottlenecks in the country is out for 2019, and where Atlanta ranked last year won’t come as a surprise.

The American Transportation Research Institute crunched data from more than a million trucks in 2019 at hundreds of different locations.

Metro Atlanta scored seven spots in the top 100, one more than it did the previous year. Three of those seven are in the top 10 - all of them on Interstate 285.

Coming in at No. 2 for the second straight year is I-285 and I-85 in DeKalb County, otherwise known as Spaghetti Junction.

Full time driver Herschel Evans, who’s spent 30 years on the roads around Atlanta, told Channel 2’s Steve Gehlbach that traffic is getting worse.

“Heavier and heavier, more and more,” Evans said.

And when trucks get stuck in traffic, so does everyone else.

“This is not congestion that is caused by trucks, this is congestion that the trucks are in as well as the cars are in,” Evans said.

Number five on the list is the Cobb Cloverleaf of I-285 and I-75 that dropped two spots this year.

But I-285 and I-20 on the west side cracks the top 10 again, jumping two spots, coming in at number seven this time.

“The morning commute coming in is probably the worst for all of them,” said Rebecca Brewster, from American Transportation Research Institute.

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