If you run, bike, or walk the dog on the Model Mile between Corporate Boulevard and Briarwood Road, you have probably assumed the trail's next move is the obvious one: keep the pavement going, push the existing route south toward the Atlanta line, and save the harder engineering, a bridge spanning an interstate, for later. That assumption has it backwards.
In July, Brookhaven, DeKalb County, Emory University, and the Georgia Department of Transportation signed a funding framework for a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over I-85 that will link the Greenway to Emory's Executive Park campus, with construction expected to begin in 2028. Meanwhile the segment immediately south of where the paved trail currently ends, the one most residents would guess is closer to a groundbreaking, is still moving through federal environmental and right-of-way review that opened back in 2024.
The order everyone assumes
The Greenway's history makes the assumption reasonable. Phase I, the 1.3-mile "Model Mile" from Briarwood Road to North Druid Hills Road, opened in December 2019 and became the template for the other three cities working on the trail. Phase II is supposed to extend that same paved mile southwest to the Atlanta city line. Phase III closes the gap on the other end, running east from Briarwood Road toward Clairmont Road and the Chamblee line. A bridge over an interstate sounds like the last piece anyone would tackle, the kind of structure that needs its own budget line, its own engineers, its own years of negotiation.
That is exactly what happened. It just happened faster than the mile next door.
What actually got funded first
The bridge deal, announced through a joint DeKalb County release on July 14, 2026, establishes the financial framework to move the connector bridge into final design and construction. Emory donated the easements for the eastern bridge landing back in 2019, and Asbury Automotive Group donated the easements needed for the western landing, closing a gap that had sat open for years. Under the agreement, no residential property tax dollars will fund the bridge's design or construction, a detail that matters more to the people paying Brookhaven's millage rate than the ribbon-cutting will.
Mayor John Park framed the deal as proof that collaboration beats waiting on any single funding source. "Big projects like this only happen when organizations are willing to collaborate, invest in the future," he said in the announcement. Construction is targeted for 2028, which sounds distant until you compare it to what is happening one trailhead over.
Why the "obvious" next mile is still catching up
Phase II has real money behind it now. In May 2026, the Atlanta Regional Commission voted to award $13.5 million in federal funding to complete the extension from North Druid Hills Road down to the Atlanta city line, where it would connect to PATH400, the Beltline's Northeast Trail, and the South Fork Conservancy trails, plus last-mile access to MARTA's Buford Highway bus line and the Lindbergh station. That is the busiest, most useful connection in the entire 12.3-mile plan.
But federal money comes with federal process. The city received National Environmental Policy Act approval in 2024 and has been acquiring right-of-way since, and Brookhaven's own project tracker lists right-of-way certification as anticipated for February 2026, with a Final Field Plan Review that took place back in July 2025 and archaeological surveys layered on top. The city's separate Phase II overview page states construction is scheduled for 2026. Read those two pages side by side and you get the real picture: an approved budget and a construction year on paper do not automatically mean shovels in the ground, especially when a federally funded trail has to clear the same review steps as a federally funded highway.
The workaround Brookhaven already tested
Phase III tells the more interesting version of this story, because the city already ran the experiment. According to Brookhaven's own Phase III project page, the council chose to fund the design and construction of that segment with local dollars instead of federal or state money specifically to move faster and avoid the kind of review timeline currently working through Phase II.
That local-funds path has not made the routing simple. At a January 27, 2026 meeting, the council committed about $28,000 to study a third possible alignment near the Barone Avenue bridge, after residents of the Hendrix and Avana Uptown apartment communities raised concerns at a September 2025 meeting about trail access near their buildings. "The apartment complex has made it clear that they don't want any access to the greenway," District 4 Council Member John Funny said at the meeting, though city officials noted the objection was about access points, not the trail itself. Preliminary engineering on Phase III began in December 2024 and was expected to run roughly two years, putting the design phase on track to wrap sometime around the end of 2026, alignment questions permitting.
What this actually looks like on your next walk
None of this changes what exists today: a 1.3-mile paved, lit, ADA-compliant trail running from the Briarwood Road trailhead behind REI to North Druid Hills Road near Corporate Boulevard, with a third parking area at Corporate Boulevard itself. Benches, bike repair stations, and dog waste stations line the route now, and Silverbacks Park sits along the corridor's longer-term plan as one of the trail's connecting landmarks.
What changes is which direction to watch for new pavement. Based on where the money and the paperwork actually stand as of this summer, here is the realistic order:
- The I-85 bridge to Emory has a signed funding agreement, donated land on both landings, and a construction target of 2028. Of the three unfinished pieces, this is the one with the fewest open questions left to resolve.
- Phase III toward Clairmont Road is funded entirely with local dollars specifically to skip the federal review timeline, but the alignment near Barone Avenue is still being finalized, with design work expected to wrap around the end of 2026.
- Phase II toward the Atlanta line has the biggest funding award of the three, secured in May 2026, but remains bound to the federal NEPA and right-of-way process that opened in 2024, which is why a 2026 construction date on paper still comes with open procedural steps behind it.
The lesson for anyone who uses this trail every week is not that the extension south is in trouble. It is that money and momentum do not always arrive in the order you would expect, and the piece that looks hardest on a map is sometimes the one that clears the finish line first.
If today's update has you thinking more broadly about what's happening in Historic Brookhaven, Frank Nelson has spent 26 years tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out anytime to talk about the area, or get your instant home valuation to see where your own property stands.
