If you have driven, biked, or walked through Downtown Atlanta at any point since the fall of 2024, you have probably been detoured by it: the Atlanta Department of Transportation's Downtown Atlanta Infrastructure Improvement Project, a rolling program that resurfaced roughly 27 centerline miles of downtown streets, restriped intersections and lane markings, and rebuilt sidewalks, ADA ramps, and street lighting ahead of the eight FIFA World Cup matches Atlanta hosted this summer.
The program never arrived as a single ribbon cutting. It showed up instead as a steady drumbeat of 'No Parking' signs and overnight lane shifts, announced week by week in the Downtown Navigator newsletter published by the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District. Read in sequence, those notices trace a map of the work.
It began on Marietta Street NW. Starting Sunday, October 27, 2024, crews shifted traffic between Ivan Allen Jr. Boulevard and Peachtree Street for overnight resurfacing, working Sunday through Thursday nights from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. through mid-to-late December. Sidewalk and ADA repairs along the same corridor, from North Avenue to Peachtree, had started a week earlier.
Forsyth Street came next. Nearly a mile of roadway between Carnegie Way and Memorial Drive was resurfaced and rebuilt around the recommendations of the city's Vision Zero Action Plan: intersection daylighting in Fairlie-Poplar, upgraded ADA ramps, a posted 25 mph speed limit, and protected bicycle and light-individual-transportation lanes through South Downtown. ATLDOT and the improvement district celebrated the finished street with a ribbon cutting and inaugural bike ride on March 11, 2025. The district later counted 450 delineators and bollards and 150 concrete wheel stops installed along Forsyth alone.
That same week, on March 10, 2025, resurfacing moved to Peachtree Street between Baker and Ellis streets, shifting traffic through the hotel district. By August 2025 the work had reached Baker Street NE/NW and Jesse Hill Jr. Drive, with daytime lane closures from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays and no formal detours.
The busiest stretch came in late November 2025. Between November 25 and December 7, crews resurfaced Elliott and Chapel streets from Mitchell Street to Northside Drive, Centennial Olympic Park Drive from North Avenue to Marietta Street, Nelson Street, and Martin Luther King Jr. Drive from West Peachtree to Whitehall. In January 2026 the program reached John Wesley Dobbs Avenue on the east side of downtown, a roughly one-week job that the district described as ATLDOT's World Cup preparation 'in full swing.'
ATLDOT Commissioner Solomon Caviness framed the work in a November 2025 video titled 'On the Road to FIFA: Building safer, smarter streets,' and the district's 2025 Impact Report put numbers to the planning side of the effort: seven major pedestrian enhancement projects underway, $750,000 invested in engineering for upcoming safer-streets construction, and an upgraded, view-preserving Jackson Street Bridge.
Pavement was only half of it. The improvement district's downtown wayfinding plan, which began with a pop-up on the Broad Street Boardwalk in November 2024 and a community discovery walk from Peachtree Center in March 2025, matured into a 92-sign pedestrian network that regional planners later said held up under World Cup crowds and could be copied in other Atlanta districts. And in June 2026 the City of Atlanta launched Navigate Atlanta, a digital hub that bundles live transit tracking, specialized route maps, and downloadable resources in one place, which the district called an especially helpful tool during the World Cup crush.
As of the August 12, 2026 edition of the Navigator, the project was still listed as 'currently underway,' with a standing warning that construction may temporarily reduce available lanes or require intermittent closures, slowing traffic around active work zones and during peak travel periods. The World Cup has come and gone; the smoother pavement, wider ramps, and better-lit sidewalks are what downtown keeps.
Source: Downtown Navigator, August 12, 2026 (Downtown Atlanta Inc.), published August 12, 2026.
