After years of construction work and millions of dollars, officials announced that the project to turn the downtown Chattanooga section of U.S. Route 27 into a parking lot is almost complete.
“Many people have complained about the lack of parking downtown, so this is a win-win situation,” said Kelly Sothton, a representative for the project.
“Previously, we had a massive construction project to move the traffic bottleneck from the Signal Mountain Road exit up to the Olgiati Bridge,” said Sothton. “In a brilliant move, we retained the congestion but just moved it to a different place.”
“However, traffic was still moving, although slowly,” said Sothton. “We told ourselves, ‘We can do better than this. We can make traffic come to a complete stop.'”