Anyone who drives, bikes or rides transit along the northern edge of the Connector is about to get a new option. Midtown Alliance says the 15th Street extension, under construction since early 2024, should finish and open to the public by the end of August, creating a two-block east-west link between the Arts Center MARTA station and Williams Street.
Adding an entirely new street to an established grid in a dense part of the city is, in Midtown Alliance's words, extremely rare. The land the roadway occupies was two empty lots, and the full two-block extension sits within Georgia Department of Transportation right-of-way, which eliminated the cost of buying real estate. Before this, 15th Street simply dead-ended at West Peachtree Street beside the AMLI Arts Center and Hanover Midtown towers, cutting off parts of Spring Street from the transit station even as buildings like Mira at Midtown Union delivered hundreds of new apartments nearby.
The design is a complete-streets layout rather than a plain roadway. Between West Peachtree and Spring streets there will be three lanes, including two left-turn lanes onto each of those one-way corridors. West of Spring, the street narrows to a single through lane in each direction running to Williams Street. Both directions get five-foot bike lanes built at sidewalk level, plus a separate five-foot zone for trees and street furniture and 10-foot sidewalks on each side. Midtown Alliance says the bike lanes are drawn to tie directly into the Arts Center MARTA station, recent residential and hotel projects, and other existing and planned bike routes in the district.
More than $6 million was assembled to build it. Roughly half came from GDOT and federal sources, with Midtown Improvement District funds and City of Atlanta impact fees covering most of the rest. Jacobs handled design work and Reeves Young is the contractor.
The timeline stretches back further than the construction fence suggests. The Atlanta Department of Transportation traces initial planning to November 2016; after an Atlanta Regional Commission grant, city and GDOT staff started design in summer 2017, and construction finally began in the first quarter of 2024 following a delay. Recent milestones include GDOT's final signal inspection on 15th Street in late July, roadway striping, and green bike-lane markings scheduled for the week of Aug. 17.
For downtown readers, the practical effect is a shorter, better-marked path to a MARTA rail station from the Spring Street corridor, and one more low-stress bike connection at the north end of the Connector — the kind of small grid repair that changes how a few thousand daily trips get made.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (2026-08-10)