Stand at Morrison Lake on a Saturday morning and you can see the whole problem. The Alpha Loop ends there, a paved path curling back toward Downtown Alpharetta and Avalon. Across GA 400, past six lanes of traffic, the Big Creek Greenway keeps going for twelve more miles through wooded creek bottoms. The two trail systems sit close enough that you could walk between them in fifteen minutes if there were a way to actually do it. There isn't, not yet, and the headlines from this past August about Alpharetta finally "connecting" its trails describe a project that hasn't broken ground and doesn't yet have a start date.
That's the part worth separating out before you plan your route around it. Two different projects are doing two different jobs on two very different clocks, and only one of them is anywhere close to finished.
The Gateway That's Actually on Schedule
The piece that's furthest along is the Encore Greenway Park and Gateway, a project the city has been building in partnership with True North 400, the self-taxing business improvement district that used to go by the name North Fulton Community Improvement District. Construction started back in February 2025, with a groundbreaking that March, and the current target for completion is December 2026.
This is the part of the connection that lands on the North Point side, at the intersection of Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway. It's built in three phases: an entry plaza where the Greenway begins, a park plaza for people to actually sit, and a raised boardwalk with a concrete deck that carries the trail over wetlands and flood plain the straight route can't avoid. True North 400 describes it as the piece that provides the critical link from the Alpha Loop to the Greenway, and the district has put real money behind that description: a total CID investment of $1.93 million, including $977,411 specifically toward the new plaza at Fanfare Way and Encore Parkway.
If you're the kind of Alpharetta resident who already treats a weekend walk on the Greenway as a given, this is the piece you'll notice first. It's scheduled to open around the same time this year's holiday lights go up.
A Second Project, a Different Clock
Here's where the confusion comes in. On August 17, the Alpharetta City Council approved a separate $15.99 million design-build contract with Reeves Young for something called Alpha Link, and most of the coverage that followed treated it as the moment the Alpha Loop and the Greenway got connected. It isn't, at least not yet.
Alpha Link is roughly a one-mile trail section running parallel to GA 400, starting at the Alpha Loop near Morrison Lake and Lakeview and ending at that same Encore Parkway and North Point Parkway gateway the Encore Greenway project is building toward. In plain terms, it's the missing arterial link on the Alpha Loop side. The Encore Greenway boardwalk gets you from the Greenway to that intersection. Alpha Link is supposed to get you the rest of the way back to the existing Loop.
The trouble is timing. City Council member John Hipes broke down the listed funding sources for Alpha Link as $10 million from TSPLOST II, $4.04 million from the city's 2021 Parks Bond, and $974,551 from the Impact Fee Fund. But as of the council's own announcement, no construction start date has been set, and once work does start, the build is expected to take about eighteen and a half months. Do the math from today and the earliest realistic opening is sometime in 2028, not this winter and not next year either.
So the two halves of "connecting the Alpha Loop to the Greenway" are running on completely different schedules. One half is a boardwalk that's already framed up and on track for December. The other half is a contract that was signed a month ago for a trail segment that hasn't been designed on the ground yet.
| Project | What It Connects | Funding | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Encore Greenway Park and Gateway | North Point Parkway/Encore Parkway intersection to the existing Big Creek Greenway | $1.93M total from True North 400 CID | Under construction since Feb. 2025; targeted for completion December 2026 |
| Alpha Link | Alpha Loop at Morrison Lake to the Encore Parkway/North Point Parkway gateway | $10M TSPLOST II, $4.04M Parks Bond, $974,551 Impact Fees (listed sources) | Contract approved Aug. 17, 2026; no construction start date announced |
Councilmember Katie Reeves put the mood in the room pretty simply after the August vote, as Appen Media reported: "We're almost to the Greenway, so that is kind of exciting." Almost is the accurate word. The two projects meet at the same intersection on the map. They don't meet on the same calendar.
What Actually Changes for You This Fall
While the bigger connection sorts itself out, something smaller and more immediate already has. The city just approved a five-year, $60,000 bike-share contract with Tandem Mobility, putting 25 public bicycles across five hubs, including stops at True North 400 and Avalon. That's not a future promise. It's live on the existing, already-connected stretch of the Alpha Loop between Downtown and Avalon, the same mile that's been open since 2020.
If your daily routine already includes a lap of the Loop or a coffee run through Avalon, this is the piece that shows up in your life first, months before either trail project finishes. It doesn't get you to the Greenway. It does make the part of the system that already works easier to use without your own bike or your car.
The Wildcard Downstream
There's one more detail worth sitting with before you assume the December date is locked in. The Encore Greenway boardwalk exists in its raised, concrete-decked form specifically because the ground underneath is flood plain and wetland, not because anyone wanted a fancier walkway. That's the same general stretch of Big Creek where high water has previously swamped yards along low-lying sections of the Greenway near Kimball Bridge Road. Nobody involved with either project has said the December timeline is in jeopardy. But a trail built to clear a flood plain is a trail that's making a bet on that flood plain behaving, and it's the kind of thing worth watching rather than assuming.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
If you live near the Loop or the Greenway and you've been waiting to string the two together into one long route, the honest answer is: not this December, and probably not next year either. The boardwalk piece on the North Point side is close. The arterial piece back to Morrison Lake has several listed funding sources but hasn't started, and eighteen and a half months of construction hasn't even begun its clock yet.
What you can do right now is use what's already there. The six miles of existing Alpha Loop connect Downtown, Avalon, and Northwinds, and a new bike-share bike is sitting at a rack in both places this fall. The Greenway's twelve miles through Alpharetta are unaffected by any of this construction and remain exactly as walkable as they've always been. The only thing that's actually new, right now, today, is a slightly easier way to get around the parts of the city that were already connected.
Alpharetta keeps building toward the day the whole system clicks together. It just isn't that day yet, and knowing the difference between the two projects that are supposed to get it there is the only way to plan a route around them instead of a headline.
If you're weighing whether a home near this corridor fits how you actually want to spend your weekends, Pamela Bills knows this stretch of Alpharetta block by block, from what's finished to what's still on paper. Schedule a free consultation to talk through what the neighborhood looks like today, and where it's actually headed next.
