Interstate 485

Here, compliments of the indispensible David Henderson, author of Sunshine Skies: Historic Commuter Airlines of Georgia And Florida, is a section of a 1972 map that shows the proposed routing of 2 controversial proposed road projects. Neither was ever fully realized. The two roads, Interstate 485 and a much more extended version of the Stone Mountain Freeway than actually came to exist, can be seen on the map below via the dotted lines that represent the plans as they existed in 1972.

Scroll down below the map for a more complete explanation of the history of this proposal.

As Wikipedia explains on its Stone Mountain Freeway page:

The Stone Mountain Freeway shares state route number 10 with Freedom Parkway, a two-mile (3km) road in northeast Atlanta that connects with the Interstate highway system at a major highway interchange on the Downtown Connector. As that designation suggests, state officials originally intended the Stone Mountain Freeway to continue west, through Decatur, Druid Hills and Candler Park, to downtown Atlanta. In pursuit of those plans, in 1969 the GDOT purchased an X-shaped swath of land designed to carry two roads: Interstate 485, running from east to west, and another freeway connecting what are now Georgia 400 to the north and Interstate 675 to the south.

Neighborhood groups and local preservationists worked together to block road construction of the highways. After 20 years of litigation and political maneuvering, community groups and state and local officials in 1991 compromised and set much of the state-purchased right of way aside as parkland, later named Freedom Park. The land proposed as the interchange of the two cancelled highways, by then, had become the site of the Carter Center.

Freedom Parkway – the last vestige of the planned downtown link of the Stone Mountain Freeway – opened in 1994.