By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
May 19, 2023 | Have you noticed the construction along the west side of a four-mile stretch of Peachtree Industrial Boulevard in Duluth and Suwanee? Gwinnett County is building part of a multi-use path, the Western Gwinnett Bikeway, on the western edge of the road, and using distinctive prefab concrete construction barrier walls in the process. It is a long-awaited bikeway, having been in the talking stage for years, and lately, has been plagued by construction delays.
It’s a $14 million contract to provide this 8 to 12 foot wide bikeway, which will allow bikers (and walkers if they risk it) to traverse this part of the county in a more safe manner. Gwinnett County got a $7 million grant for the project from the Georgia Department of Transportation, while the cities of Suwanee and Duluth are paying for part of the project through SPLOST fund, with the remainder coming from county SPLOST monies.
However, the work on the bike path is far from complete, and months behind its promised completion date. Several factors caused this delay. County officials are meeting with the contractor Monday to move the project along.
Fill dirt will go between the walls.
The barrier will be a five foot wide grass shoulder, plus 30 inch curb and gutter, between the bikeway and Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. This space from the highway should allow, if a biker were to fall over, enough room so that the biker would not fall into the roadway, but fall to the shoulder.
Precast concrete barriers are now being installed along the boulevard, using the Gravix wall system, which consists of two walls. This includes use of gravity and mechanically stabilized earth walls. The precast concrete walls have a distinctive design, with dirt filling the precast sections between the two walls, adding weight and stability to the wall section. Each of the Gravix units consists of a 32 foot panel on a triangular footing with a perpendicular arm extending approximately eight feet back from the wall.
This shows the triangular base.
The roadside face of the wall will be three feet from ground level, with a 42 inch handrail on top of the wall. The Gravix products are manufactured by Earth Wall Products of Smyrna.
Currently a major portion of the work is at Suwanee Creek, where a tall crane is being used to install a 400 foot long pedestrian bridge across the creek. The bridge setting is expected to take at least two weeks. The 12 foot wide bridge will be 30 feet above the water.
Work on the project is being contracted to the Astra Group of Woodstock. Because of several factors, including materials shortages, work on the current leg of the project is more than six months behind schedule.
Some background: The project has been virtually snake-bit from earlier days, long talked about, but never funded until recently. Then more problems sat in, primarily bureaucratic problems at the state DOT level. Then once bid in October of 2020, came more delays, to the point that the bikeway project had to be re-bid in 2021. Interestingly, the same firm, the Astra Group, was low bidder each time. So the county lost another year in the repackaging of the contract.
Now Gwinnett DOT officials are hoping that the work will proceed at a steady pace, so that the project might be completed within the next 8-12 months.
We now only hope it’ll be that soon!
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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