Ride the Alpha Loop north past Westside Parkway and the pavement is smooth, well lit, and confident about where it's going. Ride the Big Creek Greenway south from North Point Parkway and you get the same thing: 12 miles of maintained trail, wildlife along the creek, benches at the right intervals. What you don't get, no matter which direction you approach from, is a way to ride from one system into the other. GA-400 sits between them, and for years the two most-used trail networks in Alpharetta have functioned like neighbors who wave from their driveways but have never actually walked next door.
That's the piece of local infrastructure that just changed status, from talked-about to under contract. And in the same summer, a smaller, cheaper fix arrived first: the city's bike-share program, dark since 2020, is back online.
Two Trail Systems, One GA-400-Sized Gap
The scale mismatch is worth sitting with. Alpharetta's master plan for the Alpha Loop envisions a 3-mile inner loop tying together downtown, Avalon and Northwinds, plus a planned 5.25-mile outer loop, according to reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That's an ambitious, multi-phase build. The connector needed to link it to the Big Creek Greenway, by contrast, is a single 1.2-mile stretch of paved trail running parallel to GA-400 between Haynes Bridge Road and Encore Parkway.
A mile and a fifth. That's the segment that took longer to fund than the loop itself, because it required threading a trail past a highway corridor, coordinating with a business improvement district, and lining up four separate funding sources before a shovel could move. Planning for this exact connection has been on the books for a while. What hadn't existed until this year was a signed contract.
What $15.99 Million Actually Buys
In mid-August 2026, the Alpharetta City Council approved a $15.99 million design-build contract for the project, known as Alpha Link. The route runs from the Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and the Lakeview development, across the GA-400 corridor, to a new gateway near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway, where it meets the Big Creek Greenway.
Council member John Hipes broke down the funding on Facebook: $10 million from TSPLOST II, the city's dedicated transportation sales tax, $4.04 million from the 2021 Parks Bond, and $974,551 from the Impact Fee Fund, the account fed by fees on new development. Three different revenue streams, each with its own restrictions on how it can be spent, all converging on one trail segment.
A separate but related project is arriving on the same timeline. True North 400, the self-taxing business improvement district that used to be called the North Fulton Community Improvement District, is putting $977,411 toward a new plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway as part of the Encore Greenway Park and Gateway. Construction on that plaza started in February 2025 and is scheduled to finish in December 2026, well ahead of the trail it will eventually connect to. True North 400 had already put $250,000 toward Alpha Loop design work in an earlier phase, so this isn't its first check written toward closing the gap.
None of this comes with a construction start date yet for Alpha Link itself. Once work does begin, the project is expected to take roughly 18.5 months to complete, per reporting that cited CBS News Atlanta's coverage of the vote. Do the math from any realistic groundbreaking and this reads as a 2028 amenity, not a 2027 one, unless the city moves unusually fast.
There's also an open technical question nobody has answered publicly yet: how the trail's lower-elevation connections near the greenway will handle flooding. Low-lying sections of the Big Creek Greenway near Kimball Bridge Road have flooded into adjacent yards before, and it isn't yet clear from public information how the Alpha Link design accounts for that.
The Bikes Already Showed Up
While the trail waits on a construction date, the bikes didn't wait at all. On July 20, 2026, the city council approved a five-year contract with Tandem Mobility to relaunch public bike share, six years after Alpharetta's previous program, run by Zagster, shut down when the operating company ceased business in 2020.
The new setup puts 25 bikes across five self-service stations: the Town Green at Alpharetta City Center, the East Parking Deck at Avalon, a spot on the Alpha Loop near Westside Parkway, Rock Mill Park, and North Point Park. The city covers $12,000 of the annual cost; the remaining $48,000 is split among the Alpharetta Convention and Visitors Bureau, True North 400 and Avalon. Riders get the first hour free, then pay $2.50 for each additional hour.
| Station | What it puts you near |
|---|---|
| Town Green, Alpharetta City Center | Downtown Alpharetta's restaurants and shops |
| East Parking Deck, Avalon | Avalon retail, dining and the Alpha Loop's inner segment |
| Alpha Loop near Westside Parkway | The loop's western stretch |
| Rock Mill Park | Big Creek Greenway access, central section near Kimball Bridge Road |
| North Point Park | Big Creek Greenway access near North Point Parkway, the future Alpha Link gateway |
Look at that last row. The bike-share station at North Point Park is sitting right where Alpha Link is supposed to land. Residents can already pedal to the exact spot where the two trail systems are meant to meet. They just can't yet ride through.
$15.99 million to finish 1.2 miles of trail. $60,000 a year to put bikes on the miles already built. That gap in scale is the whole story of how a city actually closes a connectivity problem: cheap fixes first, the expensive one on its own clock.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you're on the Alpha Loop side of town, near Westside Parkway or downtown, you can pick up a bike at the Town Green or the Avalon deck today and ride the existing loop segments without paying for anything beyond the first hour. If you're closer to the Greenway, Rock Mill Park and North Point Park give you the same free hour on the trail system you already know.
What you can't do yet is start at one and finish at the other without detouring off-trail around GA-400. That's the piece still waiting on a contractor and a start date. Watch for that announcement, because once it comes, the 18.5-month build clock starts ticking, and the True North 400 plaza at Fanfare Way should already be finished and waiting on the other side by the time Alpha Link opens.
The distinction that matters here isn't dramatic, but it's real. For years, this connection was a line item in a master plan, the kind of project that gets mentioned at council meetings without a dollar figure attached. It now has one, plus a contractor selection process ahead of it. That's a different category of "coming soon" than the one Alpharetta residents have heard before.
Andrea Seeney tracks projects like this one because trail connectivity, park investment and the small infrastructure decisions a city makes are part of what keeps a North Fulton address desirable years after the ribbon gets cut. If you're weighing what's next for your own place in Alpharetta or Milton, Andrea Seeney welcomes a confidential conversation about what these kinds of local investments mean for your street, your search, or your next move.
