For six years, the name has been doing more work than the pavement. The Alpha Loop sounds like a single, continuous path threading through Alpharetta. In practice, if you have been riding it, you already know better. There is the stretch that connects Downtown to Avalon and up through Northwinds, and there is Big Creek Greenway on the other side of GA 400, and until this summer there was no paved way to get from one to the other without detouring onto a sidewalk along the highway frontage or just loading the bike into a car.
On August 17, Alpharetta City Council approved a $15.99 million design-build contract with Reeves Young to close that gap. It is the single biggest piece of trail construction the city has funded to date, and it exists to fix a problem most residents have quietly worked around for years rather than complained about out loud.
What Got Approved Isn't What Gets Built Tomorrow
The contract covers a trail section roughly a mile long, running parallel to GA 400 between Haynes Bridge Road and Encore Parkway. On one end it ties into the existing Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and Lakeview. On the other, it reaches a new gateway near Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway, which is where Big Creek Greenway currently picks up.
Once construction starts, the build is expected to take about 18.5 months. As of the council vote, the city had not announced a start date. That distinction matters if you are the kind of person who plans your weekend runs around what is rideable right now. Approval is a funding and design milestone. It is not orange cones on Haynes Bridge Road yet.
Councilman John Hipes, who has watched this project since before there was anything to watch, put the arc in perspective at the meeting: when he first joined council in 2018, not a single segment of the Alpha Loop existed. Today, about six miles are complete. The mile approved in August is the one that turns two separate trail systems into one continuous route, which is presumably why the project carries the name Alpha Link rather than just another Alpha Loop segment.
The Gap You've Been Working Around
If you live near Avalon or Downtown and you've ever tried to ride from the Alpha Loop over to Big Creek Greenway, you know the current options are not great. You either drop onto GA 400 frontage roads with no dedicated bike infrastructure, or you drive to a Big Creek Greenway trailhead and start your ride from scratch there. Neither is dangerous exactly, but neither feels like part of the same trail system the city markets as one loop.
That's the actual, felt version of what the data shows. The Alpha Loop's own master plan calls for a 3-mile inner loop tying together Downtown, Avalon, and Northwinds, plus a 5.25-mile outer loop, according to reporting from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Big Creek Greenway is its own long-running network on the far side of the highway. Two well-built systems, six years of steady construction, and still no shared address between them until this contract.
Two Trail Communities That Have Never Actually Overlapped
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a council agenda: Alpharetta effectively has two separate trail-going populations right now, and they don't mingle much. The Alpha Loop crowd tends to be Downtown and Avalon regulars, walking to dinner, biking to the Saturday farmers market, cutting through Brooke Street Park and Thompson Street Park on their way somewhere with a storefront at the end. Big Creek Greenway users are oriented toward North Point and points north, running shaded miles that feel more like a nature trail than an urban connector.
Councilmember Katie Reeves captured the moment at the same August meeting with a line that undersells how big a shift this is:
"We're almost to the Greenway, so that is kind of exciting."
Almost. After six years and six completed miles, "almost" is the honest word for where this stands. When the Alpha Link opens, someone living near Northwinds will be able to bike to a Big Creek Greenway trailhead without touching a car, and someone who has only ever run the Greenway will have a paved route straight into Avalon's restaurant row. That's not an incremental upgrade to an existing amenity. It's two user bases getting introduced to each other's turf for the first time.
Who's Actually Paying for This
The $15.99 million contract breaks down into three funding sources, according to figures Councilman Hipes shared publicly after the vote: $10 million from TSPLOST II, the regional transportation sales tax, $4.04 million from the city's 2021 Parks Bond, and $974,551 from Alpharetta's Impact Fee Fund, which is money collected from new development specifically earmarked for infrastructure like this.
Separately, and easy to conflate with the trail contract if you're skimming headlines, True North 400 (the self-taxing business improvement district formerly known as the North Fulton Community Improvement District) is putting $977,411 toward a related but distinct project: a new plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway called the Encore Greenway Park and Gateway. That project broke ground in February 2025 and is targeted for completion in December 2026, well ahead of the Alpha Link trail itself. True North 400 has been involved in Alpha Loop funding before, having previously committed $250,000 toward earlier design work.
Practically, that means the plaza at the North Point end of the connection may be walkable and finished before the trail segment linking to it is complete. Worth knowing if you're wondering why there might be a nice new gateway with nowhere obvious to walk from it for a while.
Why the Timing Lines Up With North Point, Not Just Trail Maps
The Alpha Link doesn't just connect two recreational paths. It ties into an Alpha Loop segment that crosses over GA 400 into the North Point area, where developer Jamestown and mall property owner New York Life have proposed a sports and entertainment district built around the hope of landing a National Hockey League franchise in a 20,000-seat arena.
That proposal is still just that, a proposal, and nobody should plan a weekend around an arena that doesn't exist yet. But it explains why the city is treating this particular trail gap as more than a nice-to-have. If North Point becomes a genuine evening and weekend destination rather than a mall corridor you drive to and park at, having a paved, direct route from Downtown and Avalon changes how residents actually use that area. Right now, the trail infrastructure and the redevelopment ambitions are arriving on parallel timelines. Whether they land close enough together to matter for this decade is the open question.
What to Actually Watch This Fall and Winter
If you're mapping your own routine around this, here's what's realistic. The Encore Greenway Park and Gateway plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway is the piece most likely to be visibly finished first, with a December 2026 target. The mile of new trail connecting Morrison Lake to that gateway is a longer runway. No construction start date has been announced, and once it begins, plan on roughly a year and a half before it opens.
In the meantime, the existing six miles of Alpha Loop and the established Big Creek Greenway trailheads remain exactly as good as they've always been. This isn't a story about waiting for something better. It's a story about two networks Alpharetta residents already love, finally getting the address they were always supposed to share.
If you're weighing a move that puts you within walking distance of either trail system, or you're already here and curious what a connected loop does to daily routines and long-term property appeal in neighborhoods near Avalon, Northwinds, or North Point, Jodi Halpert tracks these North Metro Atlanta infrastructure shifts closely and is happy to talk through what they mean for your specific street. Request a complimentary market consultation whenever you're ready to dig into the details.
