Alpharetta's Two Biggest Trails Have Never Actually Connected. Here's What Changes.

Ask a regular on the Alpha Loop where it meets the Big Creek Greenway, and you'll probably get a shrug. Not because either trail is obscure. Because they don't meet. Despite years of city marketing that talks about Alpharetta's trail network like it's one continuous system, the Alpha Loop and the Greenway have functioned as two separate loops, split by GA 400, for as long as both have existed. On August 17, 2026, the Alpharetta City Council finally put money behind closing that gap.

That's the part worth sitting with. Not the dollar figure, though it's a big one. The fact that the connection everyone assumed already existed didn't, and now has a contract, a contractor, and a price tag attached to it.

The gap nobody circled on the map

The Alpha Loop currently runs about 6 miles, threading together Downtown Alpharetta, Avalon, and the Northwinds office corridor. The Big Creek Greenway, on the other side of GA 400, covers more than 12 miles as it winds from Roswell up through Alpharetta and into South Forsyth County. Combined, that's roughly 18 miles of paved, car-free trail inside city limits, and until now, you needed a car (or a long detour on city streets) to get from one system to the other.

The reason is unglamorous but real: GA 400 sits between them. The Alpha Loop's furthest extension, a segment connecting Old Milton Parkway to Northwinds Parkway through a tunnel under Westside Parkway, opened June 1, 2024. It got the trail close to the highway. It didn't get it across.

That's what a new project called Alpha Link is designed to fix. It's a 1.2-mile paved connector running roughly parallel to GA 400, tying the Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and Lakeview into the Greenway near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway.

Once it's built, that's close to 20 miles of connected trail without a single car trip required to move between them.

What $15.99 million actually buys

The council approved a $15.99 million design-build contract with Reeves Young for Alpha Link. The funding is a mix of TSPLOST II transportation sales tax dollars, the city's existing parks bond, and impact fees collected from new development. True North 400, the self-taxing business improvement district that has backed Alpha Loop planning since its earliest design phase, is kicking in nearly $1 million of its own toward a companion piece: a plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway called the Encore Greenway Park and Gateway. That project broke ground in February 2025 and is scheduled to finish in December 2026, ahead of Alpha Link itself.

City council member Katie Reeves put it plainly at the meeting: "We're almost to the Greenway, so that is kind of exciting."

Councilman John Hipes, who has watched the Alpha Loop grow from nothing since he first took his seat in 2018, called it a good day for the city. It's a fair read. This is the piece that turns two separate amenities into one system.

The honest part: no start date yet

Here's what the approval does not include. A construction start date. The city has said the build will take about 18.5 months once crews break ground, but as of this reporting, no date had been set.

That gap matters more than it sounds like it should, because Alpharetta has a track record here worth checking against. The previous Alpha Loop expansion, the Old Milton to Northwinds segment with the Westside Parkway tunnel, broke ground in October 2022 and opened June 1, 2024. That's roughly 20 months from shovel to ribbon-cutting, a bit longer than the 18.5-month estimate now attached to Alpha Link. If that pattern holds and construction starts sometime in the coming months, a reasonable resident should expect the connector to open sometime in 2028, not next year. Nobody at the city has confirmed that number. It's a projection based on how the last comparable project actually went, not a promise.

Why the timing matters this year, not just someday

Alpha Link isn't happening in isolation. One week after the council approved the trail contract, the same body approved a much larger and more contested item: a rezoning that clears the way for Jamestown, the developer behind Ponce City Market, to redevelop North Point Mall into a mixed-use district anchored by a proposed 20,000-seat arena designed to accommodate an NHL franchise, contingent on the league committing to Atlanta by August 2031. That vote passed 4-3 after a public hearing that ran past 1 a.m. The plan, separate from the hockey question, includes up to 1,385 apartments, hotel rooms, retail, and a theater on the roughly 100-acre site.

Whatever happens with the arena, the apartments and retail don't need an NHL team to get built. And Alpha Link's eastern end lands almost exactly where North Point Parkway meets the Greenway, a short walk from the mall site. The trail connection was funded before the rezoning vote, but it now terminates at what may be the single biggest redevelopment site in the city's next decade.

Private development is already betting on the same logic. Lakeview Park, a 62-acre mixed-use project at Haynes Bridge Road and GA 400 zoned for 630,000 square feet of office space and 315 residential units, was planned with direct trail access built in from the start, according to reporting on the project. The city is also rolling out a five-year, $60,000 bike-share contract with Tandem Mobility this month, placing 25 public bicycles across five hubs, including stops at True North 400 and Avalon. None of these projects are waiting for each other. They're all assuming the same connected trail network is coming, and building toward it now.

What actually changes for your Saturday morning

For a resident who already runs the Alpha Loop from Avalon or bikes the Greenway from the YMCA on Preston Ridge Road, the practical shift is straightforward. Right now, getting from one trail system to the other means driving, or riding along streets that parallel GA 400 without dedicated trail infrastructure. Once Alpha Link opens, a loop that starts in Downtown Alpharetta could realistically extend across the highway, through the new gateway plaza at Fanfare Way, and onto the Greenway toward Roswell, all without touching a car.

It also changes what "close to the trail" means for anyone evaluating a home near the GA 400 corridor. A house within walking distance of the Alpha Loop today is close to one system. Once the connector opens, it's potentially close to both, which is a meaningfully different amenity even if the address doesn't change.

There's no confirmed opening date yet, and the honest answer for now is: watch for the construction start announcement, because that's the number that will actually tell you when this becomes real. The Alpharetta-Roswell Herald and CBS News Atlanta have both covered the approval in detail, and the AJC's coverage of the North Point vote is worth a read if you want the fuller picture of what's coming to that end of the corridor.

If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific street, a specific listing, or the timing of a move near the GA 400 corridor, that's the kind of question Courtney Lott fields regularly from people who already live in Alpharetta and are just trying to keep up with what's changing around them. Reach out anytime, or schedule your free home consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.