Alpharetta's Two Biggest Trails Are Finally Connecting, Just Not With Pavement First
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Ride the Alpha Loop out past Westside Parkway on a Saturday morning and you will eventually run out of trail. The pavement just stops. Big Creek Greenway is close, close enough to see the tree line where it picks up again on the other side of GA 400, but there is no path connecting the two. You either turn around or you get on a road that was not built with cyclists in mind. Anyone who has lived in Alpharetta for more than a season already knows this dead end by heart.
That gap is about to get fixed, but not in the order most people would guess. The expensive, headline-grabbing project still has no construction start date. The cheap one already has a signed contract and a name attached to it.
Alpharetta currently has about 6 miles of Alpha Loop open, part of a master plan that eventually calls for roughly 8 miles split between a 3-mile inner loop and a 5.25-mile outer loop. It started small: the first mile opened in April 2020, linking downtown Alpharetta to Avalon through Brooke Street Park, Thompson Street Park, and Avalon Fitness Park.
Big Creek Greenway is the other half of the equation, and it dwarfs the Loop in scale. More than 12 miles of it run through Alpharetta, part of a roughly 26-mile network that continues north through Forsyth County to Sawnee Mountain Preserve. The two systems sit on opposite sides of GA 400, and until this month, nothing physically tied them together.
In mid-August, Alpharetta City Council approved a $15.99 million design-build contract for a project called Alpha Link: a 1.2-mile, 12-foot-wide, fully lit paved trail running parallel to GA 400 between Haynes Bridge Road and Encore Parkway. It will connect the Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and the Lakeview development to a new gateway near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway, closing the exact gap that stops riders cold today.
The funding tells its own story about how these projects get paid for. Ten million dollars comes from TSPLOST II, the countywide transportation sales tax Fulton County voters approved back in November 2021. Another $4.04 million comes from the city's own 2021 Parks Bond referendum. The remaining $975,000 or so comes from impact fees. In other words, the money for a trail residents will use in 2028 was already sitting in accounts residents voted to fund back in 2021.
Here is the catch. The city has approved the contract, but it has not announced a construction start date. Once work begins, the build itself is expected to take about 18.5 months. Do the math from today and the earliest realistic finish line, assuming construction starts soon, lands sometime in 2028. If the start date slips, so does everything after it.
While Alpha Link works its way through permitting and scheduling, something faster and far less expensive already cleared council. On July 20, 2026, Alpharetta City Council approved a five-year contract with Tandem Mobility to relaunch a public bike-share program, six years after the last one folded when its operator went out of business.
The new setup is modest by design: 25 bicycles across five self-service stations, with the first hour free and $2.50 for each additional hour. The stations sit at:
The cost is small enough to feel almost like an afterthought next to Alpha Link's price tag: $12,000 a year from the city, with the remaining $48,000 split among the Alpharetta Convention and Visitors Bureau, True North 400, and Avalon. For less than half a percent of what Alpha Link costs, a rider who starts at Rock Mill Park now has a legitimate way to bridge the same corridor Alpha Link is being built to cover, just on two wheels instead of new pavement.
There is a third project worth tracking, and it lands on a much closer timeline than either of the others. True North 400 broke ground on the Encore Greenway Park and Gateway back in February 2025, a project that will give Big Creek Greenway a formal, built entry point tied directly into North Point's retail and office corridor. True North 400 is putting $977,411 toward a new plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway as part of that effort. Completion is targeted for December 2026, which means the Greenway side of this whole connection gets its finished front door before Alpha Link even breaks ground on the Loop side.
None of this rewrites what Alpharetta looks like tomorrow morning. But it does change the honest answer to a question a lot of residents have been asking for years: when do the Loop and the Greenway actually connect?
The realistic timeline now has three separate clocks running. The bike-share stations could be operational well before the end of this year, giving anyone who already treats Rock Mill Park or the Westside Parkway section of the Loop as a starting point a workaround for the gap today, not in 2028. The Encore Greenway Park and Gateway finishes by December 2026, giving the Greenway side a real anchor point even while the trail connection itself is still unbuilt. Alpha Link, the project that actually pours concrete through the gap, is funded and contracted but sitting without a start date, with an 18.5-month build once it begins.
If you already ride or walk both systems, the practical move for the next year or two is treating the bike-share stations as your bridge, not waiting on a trail that is still working through scheduling. If you are newer to the neighborhood and have only ever used one system or the other, this is the year that changes, just gradually and in a specific order: bikes first, a finished gateway second, pavement last.
Alpharetta has a habit of funding infrastructure years before residents actually feel it. TSPLOST II passed in 2021. The Parks Bond passed the same year. Both are only now showing up as an actual trail. The bike-share money, by contrast, moved from council vote to signed contract in a matter of weeks. If you want a read on how this city actually gets things built, that gap between the two timelines is the more honest story than either project on its own.
We keep an eye on projects like this because they change how a neighborhood actually functions day to day, long before they show up in any market report. If you want the fuller picture of what's happening in Alpharetta right now, our Alpharetta neighborhood guide is a good next stop, and if you're weighing this city against nearby options, we've also been tracking what's changing in downtown Alpharetta this summer. Whenever you're ready to talk through what a neighborhood like this actually offers day to day, Ligas & Co. is here to help you Start Your Journey.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Work with a dedicated team that values trust, communication, and helping you feel confident every step of the way.
