Tonight, Woodstock Decides How We Get Around for the Next Decade. Here Is How We Make Them Listen.

Jun 15
9 min read

Monday, June 15, 2026, at 7pm, the City of Woodstock holds an open house on the Comprehensive Transportation Plan update at The Chambers at City Center, 8534 Main St. There is a presentation during the City Council Work Session, and residents are invited to stay after adjournment to talk directly with staff. This plan shapes projects for years to come. The people who show up are the ones who get heard. So we are showing up, and we want you with us.

What you should be able to expect from your own city

You should be able to get where you are going without losing an hour of your day to traffic. You should be able to picture your kid biking to school without holding your breath the whole way. You should be able to imagine growing old in this city without being trapped at home the day you stop driving. You should be able to reach work, the doctor, the store, and downtown without a car being the only option on the table. In a metro Atlanta city of more than 40,000 people, none of that is too much to ask.

For a lot of us, it is still out of reach. And that is a choice somebody made, not a law of nature.

The reality, and the excuse machine behind it

Two out of three Woodstock workers drive alone to work, because for most of us there is no other way to do it. The average commute is pushing 30 minutes. There is no MARTA. Cherokee Area Transit exists but barely reaches us. The free downtown trolley people loved is gone. Transportation is the second biggest expense most households carry, right behind housing, and a family forced to own a car for every working adult loses thousands of dollars a year they would otherwise keep.

The people who feel this hardest are the ones who cannot drive at all. Kids. A lot of our seniors. Neighbors with disabilities. Working people who cannot afford a second or third car. A car only city quietly tells every one of them to stay home. For a progressive community, that is not a minor inconvenience. It is a question of who gets to fully live here and who gets left behind.

Now here is the part that should make you angry. This is not a city that cannot get things done. Read the mayor's own State of the City. Woodstock brags, accurately, that it is in the largest infrastructure expansion in its history, with more than $50 million in public projects and $210 million in private construction underway, that every major roadway is being improved, funded, or staged, and that downtown generates 40 percent of the entire county's economy on 3 percent of its land. When this city decides something is a priority, the will is there and the money appears.

So look at what it has chosen to prioritize. A $19 million parking deck. A new amphitheater. An $80 million City Center. A new six story, 130 room hotel, privately financed, with $2 million of public hotel and motel tax money routed through the Downtown Development Authority to subsidize its conference space. When the powerful and the well connected want something downtown, the will appears and the money follows. When regular residents ask for a bus line or a safe sidewalk, the answer is that it is complicated, or there is no money, or maybe in some future plan.

We are not asking the city to start rubber stamping transit on a hunch the way it too often rubber stamps development. We want the opposite. We want decisions driven by real evidence and documented need: actual traffic studies, real safety and crash data, and an honest, public assessment of who in this city cannot get around and why. Do the homework, show the public the numbers, and then fund what the evidence says people need, instead of moving on intuition or on pressure from whoever has the most money and the most access. Rigor applied fairly, to transit and to safety and not just to the next downtown project, is exactly what has been missing.

The parking program is what happens when the city skips that honest analysis. It sold the program to the public as self sustaining and seeded it with a $209,210 loan from the General Fund. This past February it quietly amended the budget to slash its own revenue projections, and then announced that revenue had "exceeded the revised budget." Read that twice. They lowered the bar, then took a victory lap for clearing it. Our review of that budget amendment found that the original projection of more than a million dollars in revenue and roughly $665,000 in profit had collapsed into a few hundred thousand in revenue and a net loss, with more taxpayer money loaned in to keep it afloat, and the underlying numbers stamped "confidential and trade secret" in the agenda packet.

That is the whole story in one example. This is a city that can do whatever it wants when the political will is there, and finds nothing but excuses when regular residents are the ones asking. That is a double standard that should not stand.

Who we are, and why this is the moment

We are North Georgia Community Action Network. We have sat in the same traffic you have. We have watched neighbors who cannot drive get stranded, and we have watched the city move heaven and earth for a hotel while telling us a bus is complicated. We did not just get mad about it. We read the plan, we pulled the budgets, and we did the homework, and that is what we are bringing into the room tonight.

We are a progressive organization, and we believe a growing city owes every resident a real way to get around, not just the ones who can afford a car for every person in the house. Transportation is a public good. It belongs to all of us, and it should be built for all of us.

Here is the good news. The city has said a full overhaul of this transportation plan is coming in 2026, funded by the new T-SPLOST. That overhaul is the opening. It is the city's own promise to take, in its own words, "an even broader look at how we connect people and places." Tonight is where we hold them to that sentence.

The plan we are bringing. Pick the one that is yours.

Every ask below is specific, and most of them are cheap next to what the city already spends downtown. Bring one. Put it on a sign. Say it out loud to staff.

1. Real public transit that does not require a car. Bring back the trolley, and make it real this time. For years the DDA ran a free trolley, leased from Cherokee County, looping about 12 stops in roughly 30 minutes: the City Center lots, Main Street, Reformation Brewery, the library, the Outlet Shoppes. People used it. People loved it. A circulator is the cheapest transit there is, and the county already owns vehicles and runs app based microtransit on software it already paid for. We are not starting from zero. We are choosing not to start.

Our ask: Fund a downtown circulator pilot in the 2026 plan, expand Cherokee Area Transit into Woodstock, and coordinate with the regional transit authority and the Atlanta Regional Commission so we are finally plugged into the network around us. Publish the old trolley's cost and ridership so we can right size a restart instead of pretending it is a mystery.

2. Sidewalks, bike routes, and crossings that are safe for everyone. Residents who gave input on the last update kept asking for one thing: a citywide sidewalk master plan that budgets the missing connections instead of building one disconnected segment at a time. The city wrote that ask down. Now it needs to fund it. And safe streets are not a partisan idea. Nobody wants a kid hit crossing the road or a neighbor killed walking home. The roundabouts the city is building genuinely help, and we should say so. But a serious plan sets a target of zero traffic deaths and designs for it.

Our ask: Fund the citywide sidewalk master plan with a prioritized, costed list of gaps. Adopt complete streets and protected bikeway standards, plus a clear, access friendly e-bike policy that posts the rules instead of shrinking where people can ride. Commit to a zero traffic deaths target. And require every sidewalk, crossing, and new roundabout to meet the 2023 federal accessibility standards, including accessible pedestrian signals, so the design works for wheelchairs, strollers, and our elders alike. Tell us, on the record, whether Woodstock even has a current ADA Transition Plan for the public right of way, and publish it.

3. Turn on the smart roads we already paid for. The city has talked up "smart traffic management," cameras and data platforms meant to fine tune signal timing. Residents who sit through the same string of red lights have a fair question: are these signals actually coordinated and timed together, or did we buy the hardware and never finish the job? Proper signal coordination is one of the highest return investments in all of transportation. Regional retiming programs in metro Atlanta have saved millions in delay for a fraction of the cost of new pavement.

Our ask: Publish the status, cost, and install date of the smart signal system and the corridor timing plan for Towne Lake Parkway and the City Center district. If the signals are not coordinated yet, commit to finishing the job and join the state's regional traffic operations program so our lights are actively managed across city lines.

4. Build the way out before you build more in. The pattern in Woodstock is backwards. The city approves the development, the traffic arrives, and then we talk about how to move people. Smart growth means multimodal access comes with the density, not a decade later. The city itself says it does not want Woodstock to become a high speed commuter corridor. The only way to keep that promise is to build the transit, sidewalks, and trail connections first, or at least alongside, the next wave of approvals. And it framed every downtown project through economic vitality, so let us use its own logic: transit and walkability are economic development. They are what younger workers and the employers chasing them now expect, and they lift the value of every property they touch.

Our ask: Apply an adequate public facilities standard in the 2026 plan. Tie major new developments to real transit stops, complete streets, and trail links, and prioritize the transit backbone now, before the next round of rooftops. Ground these calls in real traffic studies and a public needs assessment, so growth decisions follow the evidence instead of the pressure.

5. Make this a clean air and clean water plan, too. We are the city that built its whole identity around the Greenprints trail network and the creeks that run through it. We do not get to love Noonday and Rubes Creek and then lock in a car-only future that pollutes them with runoff off acre after acre of new asphalt. Every trip that does not have to be a car trip is cleaner air for our kids, less heat radiating off pavement, and our fair share of the work on climate. This is a progressive city's chance to plan like the future is real, and the bonus is that the same choices save families time and money.

Our ask: Build the plan to cut car dependence, not expand it. Add EV charging, protect the tree canopy, use green stormwater design that defends the creeks, and measure the plan's success by whether it gives people real alternatives to driving.

What happens if we do not show up

This plan does not get rewritten often, and the next full overhaul is the one being shaped right now. If the only people in the room are the ones who are happy with a car only city, that is the city we get locked into for years. The excuses we have heard for a decade become the excuses we hear for the next one. The room decides. If we are not in it, the decision gets made without us.

What it looks like when we win

Picture it. A circulator running again, so you can leave the car home and still get downtown. Sidewalks that actually connect, so a kid can walk to school and a parent can push a stroller the whole way without stepping into traffic. Bike routes safe enough that you would let your own family use them. A bus line that ties us to Canton, to Cobb, to the wider region, so a person without a car is not a person without options. Lights that are actually timed. Creeks we protected instead of paved over. Hours of your life and thousands of dollars a year, handed back to you. That is not a fantasy. Every piece of it is a choice this city already knows how to make. It just has to decide we are worth it.

How to make your voice count tonight

Come to The Chambers at City Center, 8534 Main St, at 7pm. Watch the presentation during the Work Session, then stay after adjournment to talk to staff directly. Bring a small sign that says what you want. A few ideas:

Bring Back the Woodstock Trolley
Expand Cherokee Area Transit
Connect Woodstock to Regional Transit
Fund Sidewalks, Not Just Roads
Turn On the Smart Signals We Paid For

Bring one specific ask and say it out loud. Specific asks from real residents are exactly what staff carry back into the plan.

Can't make it tonight? Your voice still counts. Email the Mayor and Council and submit a written comment for the record through the city's meetings page. This plan is built from public input, and written input is part of that record.

Reach the whole body at once: mayorandcouncil@woodstockga.gov

Call City Hall at (770) 592-6000. To submit written comment for the record, reach the City Clerk's office at (770) 592-6002.

Or email your representatives directly: