Why would a city spend six years studying a mile of pavement it already knew it wanted to build?
That's the question sitting underneath the Alpharetta City Council's August 17 vote to approve a $15.99 million design-build contract with Reeves Young for a new trail segment called Alpha Link. On paper, it's a straightforward infrastructure story: the city is finally connecting the Alpha Loop, its network of paths threading through Downtown, Avalon and Northwinds, to the Big Creek Greenway, the older and longer trail system that runs along the creek toward North Point. Six miles of Alpha Loop already exist. Twelve miles of Greenway already exist. They sit close enough that you could walk between the two systems in an afternoon, yet for years they've functioned as separate networks that happen to share a zip code.
The trail itself isn't the interesting part. The timing is.
A gap that's been priced three different ways
If you've lived in Alpharetta long enough to remember when the Alpha Loop was a sketch on a napkin, you've watched this particular connection get proposed, studied and re-priced more than once. In late 2020, the council was already looking at a piece of this same corridor, a pedestrian crossing near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway meant to tie into a Big Creek Greenway trailhead. That fragment alone was estimated at around $1.45 million. The broader connectivity study covering the whole North Point district carried a price tag north of $20 million, and nobody on the council was ready to commit to funding all of it at once.
Here's what that history looks like laid out:
| Year | What was on the table | Estimated cost |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | A single pedestrian crossing near Encore Pkwy and North Point Pkwy | ~$1.45 million |
| 2020 | Full North Point connectivity study, unfunded | $20 million+ |
| 2026 | Signed design-build contract for the Alpha Link segment | $15.99 million |
That's not a straight line of rising costs. It's a project that spent years as a plan on a shelf, occasionally priced, never funded, until this summer, when the city signed an actual contract for construction. The Atlanta Regional Commission had already flagged this exact connection in its Livable Centers Initiative transportation program well before this year's vote. The idea was never new. What changed is that Alpharetta finally put a contractor's name on it.
The new segment runs roughly a mile along the GA 400 corridor between Haynes Bridge Road and Encore Parkway, linking the Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and the Lakeview area to a new gateway near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway, right where the Greenway picks up. Reeves Young has 18.5 months to build it once construction starts, though the city hasn't announced a start date yet. According to a funding breakdown council member John Hipes shared, the money comes primarily from three places: TSPLOST II transportation sales tax dollars, the city's parks bond, and the municipal impact fee fund. That's a separate pot from the roughly $977,000 the business improvement district True North 400 is contributing toward a related plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway, part of the adjacent Encore Greenway Park and Gateway project that broke ground in February 2025 and is scheduled to finish by December 2026.
Councilman Hipes, who says he uses the loop regularly, put the moment in context at the August meeting. "This is a great day for Alpharetta," he said. "When I first sat up here in 2018, we had not completed any segments of the Alpha Loop." Fellow council member Katie Reeves was more direct about what the connection actually means for people on foot or on a bike: "We're almost to the Greenway, so that is kind of exciting."
Why now, specifically
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only read the trail story. One week after the council approved Alpha Link, it approved something much bigger just down the same corridor: the rezoning of North Point Mall.
Jamestown, the developer behind Ponce City Market, along with New York Life and The Machete Group, is planning to tear down close to half of the aging mall and replace it with a mixed-use district built around a 20,000-seat arena designed to court an NHL franchise. The council's 4-3 vote came after a public hearing that ran past midnight and drew more than 100 residents to Alpharetta City Hall. Mayor Jim Gilvin cast the deciding vote. The plan calls for roughly 1,385 apartments, more than 900,000 square feet of retail and dining, 750,000 square feet of office space, hotels, a 4,000-seat music hall, and more than 16 acres of public parks, plazas and multi-use trails woven through the site. Part of the deal reportedly hinges on the NHL committing to bringing a team to Alpharetta by August 2031, a commitment the league has not made.
North Point Mall opened in 1993 and has lost anchor tenants over the years, including Lord & Taylor, Parisian, Belk and Rich's, though Von Maur, Dillard's, Macy's and JCPenney remain open today. Whatever comes next at that site, walkable access to it matters, and the city's own reporting on the Alpha Link contract makes the connection explicit: the trail will link into the Alpha Loop section that crosses GA 400 into the North Point area, the same area where Jamestown and New York Life are proposing that entertainment district.
That's the mechanism worth understanding if you live here. Alpharetta isn't funding a recreational amenity in isolation. It's funding the pedestrian and bike infrastructure that will let residents actually reach a neighborhood that, as of today, exists only as an approved zoning application and a stack of renderings. The trail money moved first. The development it serves is still years from opening.
What you can actually ride today
None of this changes what exists on the ground right now, and that distinction matters if you're planning a weekend route. The Alpha Loop currently covers about six miles, including the mile-long stretch from Downtown to Avalon that opened back in 2020 and the newer Northwinds connector, which opened June 1, 2024, and includes a tunnel under Westside Parkway and what's widely considered the most scenic overlook on the loop. Big Creek Greenway, separately, runs about 12 miles through Alpharetta, with access points at the YMCA on Preston Ridge Road, North Point Parkway and Haynes Bridge Road.
What doesn't exist yet is the piece that ties them together without a car in between. The Encore Greenway Park and Gateway plaza, funded partly by True North 400, is under construction now and due to wrap up by the end of this year. The Alpha Link contract itself is signed but construction hasn't started, and the city hasn't said when it will. If you're the kind of resident who already knows every underpass and boardwalk on both trail systems, the honest answer for this fall is: keep doing what you're doing. The dead end near North Point Parkway is still a dead end. It's just no longer a permanent one.
What's changed is the certainty. For years, this connection was a study, a line item that occasionally got re-priced and never got funded. Now there's a contractor, a budget and a corridor. The next thing to watch isn't another vote. It's a construction start date, and what shows up next door at North Point once the fencing goes up.
If you're weighing what a stretch of Alpharetta near the Greenway or the Alpha Loop might be worth to your own daily routine, or thinking ahead to how a project like North Point could reshape a corner of the city you already know well, The Mike Price Team tracks this kind of local movement closely and is happy to talk through what it means for your specific street, not just the headline.
