Georgia · Oconee County · Traffic Alert

SR 316 Overnight Lane Closures at Jimmy Daniell Road in Oconee County, GA: Thursday Aug. 13 and Friday Aug. 14

This is planned bridge construction, not an accident. SR 316 is not being shut down. What Georgia DOT has scheduled is one right lane closed at Jimmy Daniell Road on two consecutive nights, with a rolling slowdown — the department calls it traffic pacing — run intermittently underneath a crane setting bridge beams. Thursday night the closed lane is eastbound. Friday night it is westbound. One newsroom carries the advisory in the record compiled for this page, and the department published it itself.

Schematic of the closure as Georgia DOT describes it, not to scale and not a map. It shows which lane is closed on which night and in which direction. It does not show real lane counts, geometry, distances or the position of any equipment. No coordinates for the work zone appear in the record compiled for this page, so none are drawn.

What Georgia DOT has actually scheduled

The Georgia Department of Transportation issued a traffic advisory on Aug. 12, 2026 covering two consecutive nights of overnight work on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road. In the department’s own words, opening with the condition it attaches to everything that follows: “Weather permitting, Georgia Department of Transportation (Georgia DOT) contractors will implement overnight closures and traffic pacing Thursday, August 13, and Friday, August 14, from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road for bridge beam setting activities.”

That single sentence carries the whole advisory: who, what, when, where and why. The contractors are working for Georgia DOT. The work is beam setting. The window is 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. on each of two nights. And the entire thing is conditional on weather.

The department then breaks the two nights out separately, and this is the part that matters most to a driver, because the two nights are not the same. For Thursday: “One, right lane on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road eastbound, with intermittent traffic pacing to facilitate beam setting (8 p.m. to 5 a.m.).” For Friday: “One, right lane on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road westbound, with intermittent traffic pacing to facilitate beam setting (8 p.m. to 5 a.m.).”

One night eastbound. The next night westbound. Same location, same hours, opposite side of the highway.

The department also gives itself room for more: “Additional closures and traffic impacts may be necessary throughout the weekend as construction activities continue.” That is a statement that more may be coming. It is not a schedule, and this page does not turn it into one.

Attention: this is a lane closure, not a shutdown

The single most consequential thing you can get wrong about this advisory is its scale. SR 316 is not being closed. The department’s notice describes one right lane, at one location, in one direction per night. Everything else in the notice — the traffic pacing, the message boards, the hours — is built around keeping the highway open while work happens above it.

This distinction is not pedantry. A driver who reads “overnight closures on SR 316” and concludes the highway is shut will route around a corridor that is, in fact, carrying traffic all night. On a rural-edged divided highway with limited parallel routes, that self-imposed detour can cost more time than the closure it was meant to avoid, and it puts a car on smaller roads at night for no reason. The word “closures” in the headline of the department’s own release refers to lane closures. The body of the release says so explicitly, twice, once for each night.

What you should expect instead is a lane drop with cones and lighted equipment, a signed taper well ahead of the work, reduced speed, and periodic rolling slowdowns while a beam is in the air. Slower, yes. Impassable, no.

Exactly where the work is

The work is at the point where Jimmy Daniell Road meets SR 316. Georgia DOT’s own project page for the interchange gives the location a longer official name than most drivers would ever use: “SR 8/SR 316/US 29 at CR 55/Jimmy Daniell Road.” That stacked route designation is the reason the location can look confusing on paper. Along this stretch, State Route 316 shares its roadway with SR 8 and US 29, so a single physical highway carries three route numbers at once, and different documents and different signs reach for different ones.

If you drive it, you know it as 316. That is the number on the advisory and the number used throughout this page.

The advisory does not give a mile marker, an exit number, a set of coordinates or a distance from any town, and none is supplied here. The location it gives is the intersection itself, and that is the location this page reports.

Which county this is in, and why that was not obvious

This is Oconee County, and it is worth explaining how that was established, because the advisory itself never says so.

Georgia DOT’s press release names a road and a highway and no county at all. The newsroom that published the release serves the Monroe and Walton County area. Neither of those facts settles the question, and county lines in this part of Georgia sit close together — Barrow, Oconee, Clarke and Walton all converge within a short drive of the SR 316 corridor.

What settles it is Georgia DOT’s own project documentation. The department maintains a project page for this specific interchange, headed “SR 8/SR 316/US 29 at CR 55/Jimmy Daniell Road” and subtitled, in the department’s own text, “Project ID: 0013767 | Oconee County.” The same page’s project overview reads: “The SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road Interchange project (Project ID: 0013767) is part of a series of roadway improvement projects along SR 316 from SR 20 in Gwinnett County to SR 10 in Athens, Oconee County.”

A second, independent confirmation comes from the county government itself rather than from a newsroom. Oconee County government posted the department’s advisory to its own public News Flash on Aug. 12, 2026, under the heading “SR 316 Update from GDOT — Overnight Closures Begin Thursday for Beam Setting on Jimmy Daniell Road Bridge.” A county does not normally relay a traffic advisory for work outside its own boundaries.

So: the county is attributed here to Georgia DOT’s project page and to Oconee County’s own posting, not to the traffic advisory, which does not contain it. If you are searching for this closure under Barrow County or Walton County because of where you read about it, this is the same work.

The two nights, hour by hour

Laid out as the department words it, and checked against the calendar:

The day names and the calendar dates agree. Aug. 13, 2026 falls on a Thursday and Aug. 14, 2026 falls on a Friday, which is exactly how the advisory labels them. There is no discrepancy to resolve.

Two details in that table are easy to skim past. First, the pacing window is narrower than the closure window on both ends — the lane goes away an hour before the rolling slowdowns start and comes back an hour after they stop. That hour on each side is setup and teardown: cones, signs, lighting, equipment staging. Second, the pacing is described as intermittent. It is not a nine-hour crawl. It is a series of short slowdowns, each one timed to a beam going up, separated by stretches of normal moving traffic through a lane-restricted zone.

What traffic pacing actually is

Traffic pacing — also called a rolling slowdown, a rolling roadblock or a traffic break — is a technique for creating a temporary gap in a traffic stream without ever bringing it to a stop.

Here is the mechanic. Instead of stopping cars at a barricade, pace vehicles enter the highway upstream of the work and drive abreast across the open lanes at a deliberately low speed. Traffic behind them slows to match, because there is no way past. Traffic that was already ahead of the pace vehicles keeps going at normal speed and simply drives away. The distance between the two grows, and after a few minutes there is a clean, empty stretch of roadway between the pace vehicles and the traffic that outran them.

That empty stretch is the whole point. It is the window in which a crane can swing a girder across the highway with no vehicle underneath it. When the lift is done, the pace vehicles accelerate and pull off, and traffic returns to speed on its own.

Georgia DOT’s notice calls it “intermittent traffic pacing to facilitate beam setting.” The three things that phrase tells you are that it will happen more than once, that it will be brief each time, and that it is tied directly to the crane work rather than being a general slowdown.

The advantage over a hard closure is real. Nobody is diverted, nobody queues at a stop, and the total delay for any individual driver is usually measured in minutes. The disadvantage is that it depends entirely on drivers behaving predictably, which is why what you do inside a pace matters.

What to do when you meet a rolling slowdown

If you come up behind pace vehicles on SR 316 those nights, the correct behavior is short and specific.

• Do not pass the pace vehicles. Not on the left, not on the shoulder, not through a gap. They are creating the work gap deliberately, and driving into it puts your car under a suspended load.
• Match speed and hold your distance. Stay behind the vehicle in front of you at a following distance you would accept on open highway. Rear-end collisions are the characteristic accident of a rolling slowdown.
• Turn your headlights on and your high beams off. Crews and pace drivers are working against oncoming glare all night.
• Expect the release to be sudden. When the lift finishes, the traffic ahead of you accelerates before the traffic behind you knows anything has changed. That moment — not the slowdown itself — is where the compression happens.
• Do not stop unless the traffic ahead of you stops. A pace is not a red light. Stopping in a moving lane on a divided highway at night creates exactly the hazard the pace exists to prevent.
• Put the phone down. A work zone at night with shifting cones and moving equipment is the worst possible place to be looking at a screen.

What bridge beam setting involves

Beam setting, or girder erection, is the stage where a bridge stops being columns in the ground and starts being a bridge.

The beams are the long structural members — steel plate girders or prestressed concrete girders — that span from one support to the next and carry the deck that traffic will eventually drive on. They arrive on the site by truck, often on specialized long loads that need their own escorts and their own staging area. Each one is rigged, lifted by crane, swung into position over the piers or abutments, and lowered onto bearings, where it is braced against the beams beside it.

None of that is fast. A single beam can take a substantial part of a shift from the moment rigging begins to the moment it is seated and braced, and the crane cannot be repositioned casually between lifts. This is why the work is scheduled as a block of hours rather than a quick interruption.

It is also why the airspace matters. When a bridge is being built over an operating highway, every beam has to travel through the air above the traveled lanes to get where it is going. The lane underneath the load path has to be empty while it does.

Georgia DOT describes the purpose of this work plainly: it is “part of ongoing bridge construction for the new SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road Bridge.”

Why beam setting needs a night closure

There are four reasons an operation like this happens between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. rather than during the day, and they compound.

Traffic volume. A lane closure costs delay in proportion to how many vehicles hit it. Overnight on a corridor like this, that number falls dramatically, so the same physical closure produces a fraction of the queue it would produce at 5 p.m.

Exposure. Every driver who passes a work zone is a driver who might hit something in it. Moving the work to the low-volume hours reduces the number of people exposed to the crew, and the number of chances for something to go wrong.

Crane geometry. Setting a girder is not something that can be interrupted halfway. The crane needs a stable, fixed position, a defined swing radius and a load path that stays clear from pick to placement. Assembling those conditions over a live highway takes a block of uninterrupted hours, which the daytime does not offer.

Reopening for the morning. The 6 a.m. end of the window is chosen to hand the highway back before the morning commute, which is exactly why the work has to start early enough in the evening to be finished, cleaned up and de-coned by then.

The “weather permitting” condition

Georgia DOT attaches a condition to this advisory twice, and this page will not publish it as though it were a fixed schedule.

The release opens with the words “Weather permitting.” It closes with “Exact times may change due to weather conditions.” Both of those are the department’s wording, not a hedge added here.

The reason is physical rather than bureaucratic. A crane lifting a heavy, long, high-surface-area object is extremely sensitive to wind, and lifts get suspended at wind speeds well below anything a driver would consider a storm. Rain affects footing, visibility and rigging. Lightning stops everything outdoors. A crew that loses two hours to a squall does not necessarily get those two hours back before 6 a.m.

So there are three real possibilities, and this page asserts none of them over the others: the work happens as scheduled, the work is postponed to a different night, or the work starts and runs differently than the published window. Nothing on this page promises that the right lane reopens at 6 a.m. The 6 a.m. figure is the end of the scheduled window that Georgia DOT published, and that is all it is.

What the finished bridge replaces

Georgia DOT ties this beam setting to a specific outcome, in its own words: the new bridge “will remove the existing at-grade crossing at SR 8/SR 316/US 29 and Jimmy Daniell Road.”

An at-grade crossing is the ordinary kind — two roads meeting on the same plane, with cross traffic. On a high-speed divided highway, that arrangement is the source of the crossing and turning conflicts that produce the most severe accidents. Grade separation removes the conflict by putting one road over the other.

The department’s project page for Project ID 0013767 describes the interchange improvements as the removal of that at-grade crossing and “Construction of a grade-separated, diamond interchange with a single-lane roundabout at the SR 8/SR 316/US 29 northern ramp terminal and another single-lane roundabout at the southern ramp terminal.” The same page names Archer Western alongside Georgia DOT in connection with the project.

The wider effort is called Transforming State Route 316, which is the name Georgia DOT gives its program page for the corridor. The department describes the corridor work as running “from SR 20 in Gwinnett County to SR 10 in Athens, Oconee County.”

Georgia DOT’s project page says the project was awarded in December 2024 to Archer Western Construction, LLC/BCC Engineering, LLC d/b/a Heath & Lineback for final design and construction, and that “Substantial completion is anticipated for 2028.” No cost figure and no contract value appears on this page, because none appears in the sources opened for it. Numbers of that kind circulate in discussion of long corridor programs and they are not interchangeable between projects. This page reports the two nights of beam setting and the stated purpose of the bridge, and stops there.

Where our sources differ

This is a single-newsroom story, and this page says so plainly rather than dressing it up. What the table below shows is which document established which fact — and the two places where the wording is not consistent between them.

Neither divergence is resolved here, and neither is treated as an error to be corrected on someone’s behalf. This page uses “traffic pacing” and “Jimmy Daniell Road” because those are the forms Georgia DOT uses in the body of its own release and on its own project page, and the table above shows you the alternative spellings so you can search for them.

One more point of provenance belongs here rather than in a footnote. The advisory also appears on The Walton Tribune, under the same byline, carrying the same text. The Walton Tribune and Monroe Local News are not independent of each other: Monroe Local News published an announcement in 2022 that Monroe Media Inc. had acquired the assets of Your Local News Inc., which operated the Monroe Local website, and stated that “Monroe Media Inc. is owned by Patrick Graham, proprietor and publisher of The Walton Tribune.” Two websites, one company, one reporter, one press release. That is one newsroom, and this page counts it as one.

What we don’t know yet

Everything below is genuinely open in the record compiled for this page. None of it is filled in with a plausible guess.

• Whether Thursday night’s work went ahead. The advisory was published the day before. Nothing in the record confirms the first night proceeded, was postponed or was cut short.
• How many beams are being set, or whether the two nights cover two lifts, ten, or a continuous sequence.
• How long each individual pacing event lasts. The record says intermittent and gives an outer window. It gives no duration.
• Whether Jimmy Daniell Road itself is affected at the crossing while beams are set overhead. The advisory addresses SR 316 lanes only.
• Which ramps, turn lanes or side-street movements are restricted, if any.
• What the posted speed is through the work zone, and whether it is reduced from the normal posted limit.
• Whether law enforcement is running the pacing, and if so which agency. Pacing is often run by state or local officers, but the record does not say who is doing it here.
• Any dates, times or lanes for the additional weekend impacts the department says may be necessary.
• Any cost, funding source or contract value for the interchange project.
• Whether any detour is signed, and where it would send traffic if the lane closure escalated.

This page will not be revisited to fill those in. For anything time-sensitive, the live sources described below are the answer, not this article.

Georgia’s work-zone speed and fine rules

General Georgia law, included because the department’s own advisory raises it. Georgia DOT states, in its words: “Motorists are urged to reduce speed, stay alert, and exercise caution while traveling through work zones. With workers and heavy construction equipment present at all times, awareness is critical. Increased fines will be enforced in these areas to ensure compliance and safety.”

That last sentence is not a figure of speech, and it is worth being precise about what the statute behind it actually does.

The Code section is O.C.G.A. § 40-6-188, titled “Highway work zones; reduction in speed; signage.” Its penalty provision reads: a person convicted of exceeding the speed limit, reduced or otherwise, in a designated highway work zone “shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature and shall be punished by a fine of not less than $100.00 nor more than $2,000.00 or by imprisonment for a term not to exceed 12 months, or both.”

Note what that is not. It is widely repeated that Georgia doubles fines in a work zone. The statute does not say that and does not work that way. It replaces the ordinary ceiling on a speeding fine with a far higher one, sets a floor of $100, and raises the grade of the offense to a high and aggravated misdemeanor. That is an override, not a multiplier.

The section also sets a condition that has to be satisfied before the enhanced penalty is available at all. For a driver to be cited or convicted under it, the signage the Code section requires must be present in the work zone at the time, and there must be either work zone personnel present, or — in the statute’s words — “Barriers, on-site work vehicles, or shoulder or pavement drop offs that constitute a hazard to the traveling public.” The zone has to be a real, signed, occupied work zone, not a stretch of cones left out overnight.

The signage requirement is why you see a posted notice at the start of a Georgia work zone telling you that increased penalties for speeding violations are in effect there. That sign is not decoration; it is a statutory precondition.

The statute defines a highway work zone broadly, as a segment of highway, road or street where the Department of Transportation, a county, a municipality, or any contractor for them is “engaged in constructing, reconstructing, or maintaining the physical structure of the roadway or its shoulders or features adjacent to the roadway.” Beam setting for a bridge over SR 316 sits squarely inside that description.

The baseline the enhancement is measured against is O.C.G.A. § 40-6-181, “Maximum limits,” which sets Georgia’s general speed limits and which itself states that those limits may be altered as authorized in the work-zone section. That is the mechanism by which a temporary reduced limit becomes enforceable at all. No posted speed for this particular work zone appears in the record compiled for this page, so none is published here.

The practical translation for a driver on SR 316 those two nights does not require reading any of it. A speed that would cost you a routine citation on open highway does not carry the same exposure inside a signed, occupied work zone, and the department said in advance that enforcement is elevated here. The behavior the statute is aimed at is also narrower than people assume: it is not the driver going a few over in the empty small hours so much as the driver who does not slow at the taper, changes lanes inside the cones, follows too close through a lane drop, or is looking at a screen while the lane geometry shifts underneath the car.

Georgia’s Move Over law in a work zone

Also general Georgia law. O.C.G.A. § 40-6-16 carries the catchline “Procedure for passing certain stationary vehicles,” and its own opening subsection states that it “shall be known and may be cited as the ‘Spencer Pass Law.’” Most drivers who could name it would describe it as an emergency-vehicle rule. That description is incomplete in a way that matters on a night like this one.

The section has two separate obligations, in two separate subsections, with two different triggers and two different fines.

Subsection (b) covers a stationary authorized emergency vehicle displaying flashing yellow, amber, white, red or blue lights. That is the half everybody knows.

Subsection (c) is the one that reaches a construction zone. It applies to a stationary towing or recovery vehicle, a stationary highway maintenance vehicle, or a stationary utility service vehicle that is, in the statute’s words, “utilizing traffic cones or displaying flashing yellow, amber, white, or red lights.” One detail there is easy to miss: cones alone are enough — no lights are required to trigger the duty.

What the driver has to do is the same under both subsections, and it has two halves that drivers reliably compress into one:

• Make a lane change into a lane not adjacent to the stationary vehicle, if that is possible in the existing safety and traffic conditions.
• If that lane change would be impossible, prohibited by law or unsafe, reduce speed to a reasonable and proper speed for the conditions — a speed the statute requires to be less than the posted speed limit — and be prepared to stop.

The second half is the one that applies on SR 316 those nights. With the right lane already closed, there is frequently nowhere left to move to, and no source opened for this page states how many lanes SR 316 carries through this point. Slowing is not a fallback in that situation. It is the requirement.

The penalty provision is in subsection (d). The exact figure was not established to this page’s standard in the sources opened for it, so none is published here.

The Move Over duty and the work-zone speed rules stack rather than compete. A single pass through a single work zone can involve a reduced posted limit, the elevated work-zone penalty under O.C.G.A. § 40-6-188, and a Move Over obligation under O.C.G.A. § 40-6-16 at the same time, and none of the three cancels the others.

How to check a closure before you drive

Georgia DOT ends its release with the instruction that matters most on a night when the schedule is conditional: “Before heading out, get real-time information on work status and traffic conditions. Call 511, visit 511ga.org, or download the Georgia 511 app.”

That service is 511 Georgia. Its own pages describe it as “511GA, Georgia’s Official Traffic and Travel Information Service,” and as Georgia’s official travel information system, operated by the Georgia Department of Transportation. There are three ways in, and they are the three the department names:

• Dial 511 from a phone in Georgia. It is a three-digit code, not a toll-free number, and no other number is published here because none appears in the sources opened for this page.
• Visit 511ga.org in a browser for the map, incidents, construction and camera views.
• Use the Georgia 511 app, which the department names in the release.

A practical note about all three: check them before you leave, not while driving. A conditional overnight closure is exactly the situation where the state of the road at 6 p.m. and the state of the road at 10 p.m. can differ, and the phone is the wrong place to find that out at 70 miles an hour.

Reading the message boards on the corridor

Georgia DOT says in its release that “Variable Message Signs (VMS) will be placed at each end of the project to notify the public of the upcoming work.”

Those boards are the most current thing on the corridor, and they beat any published schedule, including this page. A message board is updated by the people running the work zone. An advisory published the day before is not. If the board says something different from what you read anywhere — here, on 511, on a news site — the board is describing the road you are actually on.

Two habits are worth having. Read the board on the approach, not as you pass it, because these signs cycle through two or three panels and you will only catch one at close range. And treat “at each end of the project” literally: the boards mark the limits of the work zone, so seeing one is your notice that the restriction begins soon, not that you are already in it.

Who to contact at Georgia DOT

The agency that owns this closure is the Georgia Department of Transportation. It is not the Oconee County government, not the sheriff’s office, not the Georgia State Patrol and not a city police department, and those agencies are not interchangeable — calling one about another’s work zone gets you nowhere slowly.

The only contact address in the department’s own release for this work is its Office of Communications media address, [email protected]. That is a press contact for newsrooms, not a driver hotline, and this page describes it as what it is rather than as a general help line. No project office phone number, no district number and no work-zone complaint line appears in the record compiled for this page, so none is published here.

For the state of the road, the department’s own answer is 511 and 511ga.org. For the project, it points to its Transforming State Route 316 program page. The questions worth asking about a work zone, whichever route you use, are narrow and answerable: which lane is restricted tonight, in which direction, whether the pacing is running, and whether the schedule has moved.

If you are in an accident in a work zone

This section is general Georgia procedure. It is not a report about anything that has happened at Jimmy Daniell Road, and nothing in the record compiled for this page describes an accident there.

A work zone changes the practical steps in a few specific ways.

• Get out of the live lane if you safely can. A night work zone has narrowed shoulders, equipment where the shoulder used to be, and drivers who are already navigating an unfamiliar lane shift. A stopped vehicle in a travel lane is the second accident waiting to happen.
• Call 911 and say “work zone” out loud. It changes what gets dispatched and how the responding units approach the scene.
• Record the zone itself, not just the vehicles. Where the cones began, which lane was closed, whether the taper was signed, whether the message boards were lit, whether a pace vehicle was ahead of you, where the lighting plant was. Photograph it if you are able to.
• Understand that the evidence is perishable. A night work zone is dismantled by morning. Nobody reconstructs the cone layout for you three weeks later, and no agency preserves it on your behalf.
• Get the report number before you leave the scene, along with the responding agency’s name. Those two items are what every later step depends on.
• Get checked medically even if you feel fine. The injuries that show up the next morning are the common ones, not the exception.
• Note whether a contractor vehicle was involved, and get any company name and unit number visible on it. A construction contractor is a different party from the state, and identifying it early costs nothing.

This page is not legal advice, and The Local Alert is not a law firm.

How to get an accident report in Georgia

Also general procedure, and included because it is the question that follows the one above.

In Georgia, the report belongs to the agency that worked the scene, and that agency is the one you request it from. A state trooper’s report is held by the Georgia State Patrol. A sheriff’s deputy’s report is held by that sheriff’s office. A city officer’s report is held by that city’s police department. Georgia DOT does not investigate accidents and does not hold accident reports, and a request sent to the wrong agency does not get forwarded — it gets returned, weeks later.

Reports are not usually available the same day. There is a lag between the scene and a completed, reviewable report, and that lag is longer when the report is still open for supplements. What you need to make the request is the date, the location, the report number if you have it, and the names of the drivers involved.

Read the completed report when you get it. Reports contain factual errors — misspelled names, wrong vehicle details, a transposed direction of travel — and correcting one is a conversation with the issuing agency, not something that happens by itself.

Practical next steps for drivers on this corridor

If you use SR 316 through Jimmy Daniell Road on Thursday or Friday night, the useful actions are short.

• Check 511ga.org or dial 511 before you leave. The schedule is conditional and the check takes under a minute.
• Know which side you are on. Thursday night the restriction is eastbound; Friday night it is westbound. If your trip only crosses this point in one direction, only one of the two nights concerns you.
• Move left early. The closed lane is the right lane both nights. Merging at the taper in the dark, alongside a truck, is the avoidable part.
• Add time rather than adding a detour. A lane closure with intermittent pacing costs minutes. Routing around the corridor on unfamiliar roads at night can cost considerably more, and there is no published detour to follow because the highway is not being closed.
• If your trip is flexible, shift it outside 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. That is the simplest answer and it is available to more people than they think.
• Read the message boards on the approach. They are more current than any schedule, this one included.
• Do not treat 6 a.m. as a promise. Weather moves this work, and the department says so in its own release.

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Frequently asked questions

Is SR 316 closed in Oconee County right now?
No. Georgia DOT’s notice describes an overnight lane closure with intermittent traffic pacing at Jimmy Daniell Road, not a shutdown of SR 316. The department’s own release specifies “One, right lane on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road eastbound” on Thursday night and “One, right lane on SR 316 at Jimmy Daniell Road westbound” on Friday night. The other lanes are not described as closed. If you are planning a long detour around the corridor on the belief that the highway is shut, the notice in the record compiled for this page does not support that.

Which lane is closed, and on which night?
Thursday night, Aug. 13, the closure is one right lane eastbound. Friday night, Aug. 14, the closure is one right lane westbound. The two nights are not the same, and a driver who assumes Friday repeats Thursday will be looking at the wrong side of the highway. Both are at Jimmy Daniell Road.

What are the exact dates and times?
Georgia DOT’s release gives the overnight closures as Thursday, August 13, from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., and Friday, August 14, from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m. Within each of those windows, the intermittent traffic pacing is listed for 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. Aug. 13, 2026 is a Thursday and Aug. 14, 2026 is a Friday, so the day names and the calendar dates in the notice agree.

Is any of this an accident?
No. Nothing on this page describes an accident, an injury, a death or an emergency. This is scheduled bridge construction announced in advance by the Georgia Department of Transportation. The lane closure exists so that crews can set bridge beams, and it was published as a traffic advisory the day before the first night of work.

What does “traffic pacing” actually mean?
Traffic pacing is a rolling slowdown. Rather than stopping traffic at a barricade, law enforcement or contractor vehicles drive abreast at a low speed ahead of the traffic stream, opening a gap in the roadway behind them. That gap is what lets a crane swing a beam across the highway with no vehicle underneath it. Georgia DOT’s notice calls it “intermittent traffic pacing to facilitate beam setting,” and the word intermittent is the operative one: it is expected to happen more than once across the night, not continuously.

What should I do if I drive into a traffic pace?
Stay behind the pace vehicles, do not pass them, and do not try to move up through the gap they have opened. That gap is a work area, not an empty lane. Match your speed to the vehicle ahead of you, leave following distance, and expect the slowdown to end as abruptly as it began, because a pace is released once the lift is finished. The most dangerous moment in a rolling slowdown is the release, when traffic in front of you accelerates and traffic behind you has not yet realized it.

Will the lane definitely reopen at 6 a.m.?
The notice does not promise that. Georgia DOT’s release opens with “Weather permitting” and states plainly that “Exact times may change due to weather conditions.” Beam setting is a crane operation, and crane operations are called off or extended for wind and rain. The 6 a.m. figure is the scheduled end of the closure window, not a guarantee, and this page does not treat it as one.

What is bridge beam setting?
Beam setting is the stage of bridge construction where the girders — the long structural beams that carry the deck — are lifted into place on top of the piers and abutments. They are delivered by truck, rigged, lifted by crane and lowered onto bearings. On a bridge being built over a live highway, the beams travel through the airspace above the traveled lanes, which is why the lanes underneath have to be cleared while each one swings.

Why does beam setting need a night closure?
Because the work happens above moving traffic and cannot be done alongside it. Setting a girder requires a stable crane position, clear airspace and no vehicles under the load path. Doing that at 7 p.m. through 6 a.m. puts the operation into the hours when the corridor carries the least traffic, which shortens the queue the closure creates and reduces the number of drivers exposed to the work zone.

What county is Jimmy Daniell Road at SR 316 in?
Oconee County. Georgia DOT’s own project page for this interchange is headed “SR 8/SR 316/US 29 at CR 55/Jimmy Daniell Road” and labeled “Project ID: 0013767 | Oconee County.” The same page describes the work as “part of a series of roadway improvement projects along SR 316 from SR 20 in Gwinnett County to SR 10 in Athens, Oconee County.” The advisory itself does not name a county, which is why the county here is attributed to the project page rather than to the advisory.

Will there be more closures over the weekend?
Georgia DOT’s release says “Additional closures and traffic impacts may be necessary throughout the weekend as construction activities continue.” That is a statement that more may come, not a schedule. The record compiled for this page contains no dates, times, lanes or directions for any closure beyond the two nights listed, and none are invented here.

How do I check whether the closure is on before I drive?
Georgia DOT’s release directs drivers to “Call 511, visit 511ga.org, or download the Georgia 511 app.” The service describes itself as “511GA, Georgia’s Official Traffic and Travel Information Service,” and its own help pages describe it as Georgia’s official travel information system, operated by the Georgia Department of Transportation. Dialing 511 inside Georgia reaches it. The other live check is on the road itself: the release says variable message signs will be placed at each end of the project.

What are Georgia’s work-zone speed and fine rules?
The Code section is O.C.G.A. § 40-6-188, titled “Highway work zones; reduction in speed; signage.” It provides that a person convicted of exceeding the speed limit, reduced or otherwise, in a designated highway work zone “shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of a high and aggravated nature and shall be punished by a fine of not less than $100.00 nor more than $2,000.00 or by imprisonment for a term not to exceed 12 months, or both.” The general speed limits it can override are set by O.C.G.A. § 40-6-181, “Maximum limits.” Note what the statute does not say: it does not double anything. It replaces the ordinary ceiling with a much higher one and raises the grade of the offense.

Does Georgia’s Move Over law apply in a construction zone?
Yes, through a specific subsection. O.C.G.A. § 40-6-16, “Procedure for passing certain stationary vehicles,” is known in its own text as the “Spencer Pass Law.” Subsection (b) covers authorized emergency vehicles. Subsection (c) is the one that reaches a construction zone: it applies to a stationary highway maintenance vehicle “utilizing traffic cones or displaying flashing yellow, amber, white, or red lights.” Cones alone are enough to trigger it. The duty is to change into a lane not adjacent to the vehicle if that is possible, and if it is not, to reduce speed below the posted limit and be prepared to stop. The penalty provision is in subsection (d); the exact figure was not established to this page’s standard in the sources opened for it, so none is published here.

Who do I contact at Georgia DOT about this work zone?
The Georgia Department of Transportation owns this closure. It is not the county, not the sheriff’s office, not the Georgia State Patrol and not a city police department, and those agencies are not interchangeable. The only contact address in the department’s own release for this work is its Office of Communications media address, [email protected], which is a press contact rather than a driver hotline. For the state of the road, the release points to 511 and 511ga.org. For the project itself, it points to its Transforming State Route 316 program page.

What should I do if I am in an accident inside a work zone?
Treat it as you would any Georgia accident, with two additions. First, get out of the live lane if the vehicle and your injuries allow it, because a work zone at night has less shoulder, less sight distance and more equipment than open highway. Second, note what the work zone actually looked like — where the cones started, which lane was closed, whether the message boards were lit, whether a pace vehicle was ahead of you. Those details are perishable, the zone is rebuilt or removed within hours, and no one reconstructs them for you later. Report the accident, get the report number, and get checked medically even if you feel fine.