Twenty-eight crashes on I-285
Excerpt: August 23–29.
The Perimeter, the clock, and the ramps the paper kept naming.
For the week of August 23 through 29, twenty-eight crash reports named I-285 as the road. Eight of those listed an injury. Six were marked hit-and-run. Most of the week’s Perimeter paper was written in Sandy Springs. The rest sat at I-75, Cobb Parkway, and Powers Ferry Road.
The clock mattered as much as the mile marker. Nine of the twenty-eight landed between 6 and 10 in the morning. Seven landed between 3 and 7 in the evening. Six came after 7 at night or before sunrise. The highway did not have a single “bad hour.” It had a workday, stretched out.
The name that kept coming back in Sandy Springs was Roswell Road. Seven reports put the crash at Roswell Road, near it, or at the Roswell bridge. Two of those were before 8 a.m. on Tuesday the 25th — one a mile west of Roswell Road at 6:37, with two people marked injured; another a thousand feet west at 7:11. That same Tuesday an eastbound crash at Roswell Road at 6:10 p.m. was marked hit-and-run. Thursday night, two westbound reports at the Roswell bridge landed six minutes apart, at 9:15 and 9:21. The second was marked hit-and-run. That is one week on one stretch. It is not a study of the bridge.
Glenridge kept showing up too. A hit-and-run east of Glenridge Drive on Monday morning. A westbound crash at the Glenridge underpass at 5:20 Tuesday afternoon, with an injury marked. Another just east of the underpass at 5 p.m. Thursday, also with an injury marked. New Northside Drive appeared five times. Riverside Drive and Long Island Drive appeared more than once. One westbound motorcycle crash was marked just north of Riverside on Monday afternoon.
West of there, three reports named the I-75 interchange. One of those, at 11:25 on Wednesday night, listed two injuries. Cobb Parkway and Powers Ferry Road each appeared once on the same highway. The Powers Ferry crash, at 6:23 Saturday morning, was marked hit-and-run.
Elsewhere last week the paper named other roads you already drive: Barrett Parkway, Bells Ferry Road, South Cobb Drive, Highway 92, Austell Road. Three reports involved a person on foot — North Marietta Parkway at Church Street around noon on Friday, Pitts Road at Spalding Drive that evening, and one on private property at Reinhardt College Parkway. The parking lot stays a parking lot.
Twenty-eight on I-285 is a lot of ink for one road. It is also a road that carries a lot of metal. The useful sentence is small. Last week the reports kept pointing at the Perimeter, especially in Sandy Springs near Roswell Road, and they did it in the hours people already distrust — the morning go-to-work window, the late afternoon, and after dark.
The map is the same stream of reports, dropped where the forms put them.
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