Walk the Northside Trail south from Bobby Jones Golf Course this week and you will hit a wall of traffic at Northside Drive. There is no signal built for foot traffic, no way to keep going toward Trabert Avenue without stepping into a busy multilane road. That has been true for more than a year. It is about to change, and not because Collier Hills asked loudly enough. It changed on a construction calendar that had nothing to do with the neighborhood at all.
The trail that already changed once
If you live closer to Underwood Hills or park near Monday Night Brewing's Grove location, you already know the first half of this story. Segment 3A of the Beltline's Northwest Trail, running from Trabert Avenue up to Northside Drive, opened to walkers and cyclists in July 2025. It gave that stretch of the corridor its first real piece of car-free ground, and it has been busy ever since.
But it stops cold at Northside Drive. The 2.9-mile Northside Trail that winds through Tanyard Creek Park, past Bobby Jones Golf Course, and up toward Ardmore Park is a separate, self-contained loop. The two pieces of paved trail do not touch. Get from one to the other on foot today and you are crossing a busy multilane arterial at grade, which is exactly what most people avoid doing.
The real reason for the wait
Atlanta Beltline Inc. is now soliciting bids for the one-mile Segment 3B, the piece that finally closes that Northside Drive gap. The plan includes a new pedestrian bridge over Northside Drive, with the trail continuing through the Atlanta Technology Center property before joining the existing trail through Tanyard Creek Park. It will improve connectivity for Underwood Hills, Collier Hills, Channing Valley, and Ardmore all at once, since all four neighborhoods share this same missing link.
Construction on that segment was scheduled to start in mid-2026, timed deliberately to begin only after the 2026 FIFA World Cup matches hosted in Atlanta concluded. As of this writing in mid-August, that window has passed, which means the corridor is now clear for the bid to move forward on the schedule Atlanta Beltline Inc. laid out.
This is not the only piece of trail near Collier Hills sitting at the starting line. A short distance away, Segment 2 of the Northwest Trail starts at the southeast corner of Bobby Jones Golf Course and runs east along Colonial Hills Circle, eventually feeding into a planned tunnel under Peachtree Street that the Beltline has already reached an agreement with the Georgia Department of Transportation to build. Design on that segment is complete and real estate and easement work has been wrapping up through the spring, with the project expected to go out to bid later this year in its own right. Two separate contracts, two separate reasons for the delay, both landing in the same construction season. For a neighborhood that has watched this corridor sit half finished for a year, that overlap matters more than either project alone.
What you can already reach without a car
None of this changes what is already sitting inside the current loop, which is worth using while it still looks the way it does today. From the Tanyard Creek entrance off Collier Road, you can reach:
- Tanyard Creek Park itself, 14.5 acres wedged between Collier Hills and Collier Hills North, with a wooden CSX train trestle arching over the creek and historical markers describing the Battle of Peachtree Creek, fought on this same ground in 1864.
- Two playgrounds and open fields on the west side of the creek, where dogs off leash regulations aside, the open grass has been the neighborhood's default answer to "where do we let the kids run" for years.
- Bitsy Grant Tennis Center, reached by following the trail north under the Collier Road bridge.
- Bobby Jones Golf Course, the reversible Bob Cupp design that replaced the original tight 1930s layout, along with its restaurant, Boone's, which has built a following well beyond the golfers who play the Azalea and Magnolia nines.
All of that connects today with no detour and no crossing at grade. It is the version of the loop Collier Hills has had for over a year, and it is worth walking through the rest of this year before anything changes.
What actually changes, and when
Twenty eight months from a mid-2026 start lands the finished Segment 3B somewhere in late 2028. That is the honest timeline. It means the loop residents have been using all summer, Tanyard Creek Park to Bobby Jones to Bitsy Grant, bounded by that hard stop at Northside Drive, is likely to hold its current shape through the rest of this year while crews mobilize and the bridge foundation work gets underway. The payoff, a continuous car-free connection from Underwood Hills through Collier Hills and Channing Valley to the Trabert Avenue corridor and Monday Night Brewing, is a 2028 story, not a 2026 one.
What that means practically for anyone who walks this stretch daily: expect fencing and equipment staging to start showing up near the Northside Drive crossing and the Tanyard Creek Park entrance sometime after this year's remaining construction bids close, not before. The stretch through the park itself, the trestle, the fields, the markers, is not part of the active build zone and should stay walkable throughout. The disruption, when it comes, will be concentrated at the crossing itself and along the corridor toward the Atlanta Technology Center property, not inside the park.
For a neighborhood that has spent more than a year with a trail that dead ends at a busy road, that is a real date on a real calendar, which is more than most Beltline segments get to claim this far out. It is also a reminder that a lot of what changes daily life in Collier Hills, whether it is a new bridge, a reopened trail, or the next storefront to open along Collier Road, tends to move on schedules set somewhere else entirely.
If you are weighing a move in or out of Collier Hills, or just want a sense of how a project like this tends to shift what a property near the trail is worth over time, Sonny Jones has been tracking this corridor closely. Request a private consultation to talk through what's actually happening on the ground here, block by block.
