On a Monday morning in late August, Mayor John Bradberry stood with council members Larry DiBiase and Chris Coughlin outside a new pedestrian tunnel beneath Medlock Bridge Road for a ribbon-cutting most residents will drive past a dozen times before they notice. The tunnel cost about $7 million, paid for through Fulton County's voter-approved TSPLOST II transportation tax, and its floors are turfed rather than paved, built with pop-up markets in mind as much as foot traffic. It connects the city's emerging Town Center to the Medley development going up next door.
That ribbon-cutting is easy to file under routine infrastructure news. It isn't. It's the second time in three years that Johns Creek has physically welded together pieces of the city that used to require a car to get between. The first time, most people didn't notice either. This fall is the first season both connections are actually usable at once, and it changes how you'd plan a Saturday here.
Three Islands, Three Trips
For most of Johns Creek's history, its best outdoor spots functioned like separate destinations rather than one system. Cauley Creek Park, the city's newest and largest green space at 203 acres, sits along Bell Road with its own parking lot and its own rubberized 3.1-mile trail. Jones Bridge Trail, a roughly 4.3-mile loop through the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area off Barnwell Road, sits on the opposite side of town. Newtown Park's dog runs, Autrey Mill Nature Preserve's two miles of forest trails, and the shops and restaurants clustered near Town Center each had their own address and their own errand logic. You picked one per outing.
That's the pattern this piece is about breaking. Two bridges, one built for cars and one that never existed at all until 2023, have started stitching those islands together. A third connection is funded but still years from concrete.
The First Stitch: A 1912 Bridge Comes Back as a Crosswalk
The quieter of the two connections happened first. Rogers Bridge originally carried traffic over the Chattahoochee River starting in 1912 and closed in the 1970s once it fell into disrepair. In 2023, a joint effort between Duluth, Johns Creek, Gwinnett County and Fulton County rebuilt it as a $5.9 million pedestrian and bike crossing, the same 228-foot span as the original but built with a much heavier steel truss. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution covered the ribbon cutting that summer, alongside the unveiling of a new 27-foot public art piece, "The Shape of Time and Water," built from steel salvaged off the original bridge.
What that bridge actually did was turn Cauley Creek Park's rubberized trail into a doorway rather than a loop. Walk the trail to its far end and you're no longer facing a turnaround. You're crossing the river into Duluth's Rogers Bridge Park, home to the Chattapoochee Dog Park, which the AJC named one of the seven best dog parks in metro Atlanta back in 2017. Before 2023, getting from one to the other meant driving around through two different counties. Now it's a continuation of the same walk.
The Second Stitch, Barely a Month Old
The tunnel from that August ribbon-cutting does something similar for a different part of the city, and it's worth being precise about which tunnel this is, because Johns Creek actually has two. The older one, a 130-foot mural designed by artist Hanif Kureshi, has run beneath Medlock Bridge Road near its intersection with McGinnis Ferry since 2018. It's a genuine piece of public art, tucked near the Hampton Inn and Panera Bread parking lot, and it mostly connects hotel guests to the shops at the Johns Creek Village Shopping Center.
The new tunnel sits farther north, just off Johns Creek Parkway, and its job is entirely different. It's the piece that lets someone standing in the walkable core of Town Center get to Medley, the 43-acre mixed-use development opening in phases this fall, without crossing State Route 141 on foot at grade. Medley's first restaurants and shops are expected to open through early fall, with a fuller grand opening set for October 29. Before this tunnel, that stretch of road functioned as a real barrier between the two sides of a district the city has spent years trying to build as one place.
What's Still Missing
Not every gap has closed. The stretch of riverfront near Jones Bridge Trail, on the western side of the city, remains disconnected from the eastern loop around Cauley Creek Park. The city has a plan for that too: a Chattahoochee Greenway project that would build a 1.1-mile path from Abbotts Bridge Road to Cauley Creek Park's trail system, funded by a nearly $7 million budget that's mostly federal money with about $1.5 million in city matching funds. City Council approved the federal funding agreements on March 2, and the project is currently in engineering and design.
The realistic timeline runs longer than most people expect for something already funded. Right-of-way acquisition is targeted for 2027. Construction on this first phase is targeted for 2028. A second phase, extending the trail roughly three more miles from Cauley Creek Park to McGinnis Ferry Road, wouldn't start until after 2029.
That means the Jones Bridge side of the city stays its own separate trip for at least a couple more years, even as the eastern half of Johns Creek keeps getting more connected. If you've been waiting for one continuous river path from Abbotts Bridge all the way to Duluth, this fall isn't it. What this fall does offer is the first season where two of the three islands are already joined.
This Fall's Actual Walk
Here's what that looks like in practice, based on what's open right now:
- Start at Cauley Creek Park. Run the 3.1-mile rubberized trail, then keep going across the Rogers Bridge crossing into Duluth. If you've got a dog, the Chattapoochee Dog Park on the other side has separate runs for large and small breeds.
- Treat Jones Bridge Trail as its own outing, not a detour. It's still a standalone trip this year, so plan for it as one. The moderate, roughly 4.3-mile loop through the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area rewards an early start, when the light comes off the water and the shoals are easiest to see.
- Refuel near the trailhead. Where's the Scoop makes small-batch rolled ice cream from scratch daily. Peach Coffee Roasters roasts its beans in house. Mavericks So-Cal Mexican Cantina has a patio built for exactly this kind of afternoon.
- If you're near Town Center, walk the new tunnel just to see it before the crowds do. The turf floor is meant for pop-up markets, and it will look different once vendors start filling it than it does empty.
- Six Bridges Brewing rounds out a dog-friendly loop. The taproom runs food trucks Friday and Saturday nights and welcomes dogs on the patio, which makes it a natural stop after a Rogers Bridge crossing if you're not ready to head home yet.
None of this required a single grand unveiling. It happened in pieces, two years apart, funded by two different revenue sources, built by two different sets of contractors. That's a pattern worth watching if you live here, because it means the next stitch, whenever the Greenway's Phase 1 breaks ground, will probably arrive the same way: quietly, on a weekday morning, with a small crowd of officials and a ribbon most people will drive past without noticing.
If you've been treating Cauley Creek Park, Jones Bridge Trail, and Town Center as three separate errands, this is the first fall where two of them are actually the same walk. The third is still a couple of years out, but it's funded, it's designed, and it's coming.
Whenever you're ready to talk about what changes like these mean for a specific street, a specific listing, or your next move in Johns Creek, Stovall Properties Group is a call or text away.
