If you drive the Highway 70/100 split every morning, you already know it by feel before you know it by name: the merge that never quite works, the left-turn queue that backs into the through lane, the moment you check your mirror twice instead of once. Metro has been talking about fixing that corner for years. What most West Meade residents haven't connected is that the fix for your intersection and the fight over Percy Warner Park's mountain bike trails are, underneath the paperwork, the same project.
Two Problems, One Corner
Start with the intersection itself. Officials have called the Highway 70/100 split a dangerous intersection, and reporting from April 2026 put a number on it: 85 crashes there since 2020. That statistic is the reason redesigning the split has become the main focus of Metro's current road work in this part of the city, alongside a separate traffic-calming project on Lynnwood Boulevard.
Now walk into the woods on the other side of Highway 100. Percy Warner and Edwin Warner Parks sit directly across the road from West Meade, and Cheekwood Estate and Gardens sits just past them. Both destinations have absorbed a surge in visitors over the past several years, and the overflow hasn't stayed contained to Cheekwood's own lot. Metro Planning's Belle Meade Highlands Design and Mobility Study found that Cheekwood and the park's golf course lot together push an unsustainable volume of traffic onto residential streets like Page Road and Forrest Park Drive, streets that were never built to carry that load.
Those two stories read like separate agenda items. They aren't. Metro Planning's preferred solution for the Cheekwood overflow problem is what the study calls Option A: a new shared-access roadway cut directly off State Route 100, on the northern edge of Percy Warner Park. That means the fix for the park's parking problem and the fix for your intersection sit on the same short stretch of road. Whatever curb cut, signal timing, or turn lane Metro eventually builds for Cheekwood traffic will interact with the same 70/100 corridor residents already navigate every day.
What Option A Would Actually Change
This is the part that hasn't made it into most of the coverage residents have seen. Friends of Warner Parks, the nonprofit that advocates for the park system, has been direct about the tradeoff built into the preferred option: both Option A and the alternative Option B would use Percy Warner Park property, and both would disrupt the existing mountain bike trails and negatively impact the forest habitat around them.
For anyone who rides those trails, that's not an abstract planning detail. A few things worth knowing if you use the park regularly:
- The mountain bike trails at Percy Warner are the only natural-surface mountain biking network in the immediate Nashville area, with the next closest riding roughly 30 minutes away in Bell's Bend. There is no easy substitute a few miles down the road.
- Friends of Warner Parks has committed to keeping representatives involved through NDOT's technical analysis phase specifically to push back on route options that cut through the trail network or degrade the forest around it.
- The stated goal of the road option is not to add more traffic capacity for its own sake. It's to end Cheekwood's current practice of using Percy Warner Park land for overflow visitor parking, and to route that traffic away from Page Road and Forrest Park Drive.
That last point matters if you live closer to those residential streets than to the trailhead. The study's own traffic counts, taken during the golf course renovation and again after it reopened, showed that Cheekwood and the park's golf lot independently contribute to traffic volumes the neighborhood streets were never designed to hold, and that rerouting that traffic would meaningfully cut the load on Page Road, Forrest Park Drive, and Belle Meade Boulevard. So the tradeoff is real on both sides: quieter residential streets against a construction footprint inside the park.
The Project That Already Has a Start Date
While the Cheekwood access question is still working through NDOT's technical review, one nearby fix is already scheduled. Residents along Lynnwood Boulevard voted on their own traffic calming, and 77 percent came back in favor of adding speed cushions along the road between Tyne and Harding. As of the April 2026 reporting, construction on that project was slated to begin within 8 to 12 months, which puts a realistic build window somewhere between late 2026 and early 2027.
Lynnwood Boulevard isn't the Highway 70/100 split, but it sits inside the same web of streets that absorb cut-through and overflow traffic tied to the park and Cheekwood corridor. Seeing speed cushions actually go into the ground there is a useful signal that Metro's broader Belle Meade Highlands plan, adopted as an implementation framework by the Metro Planning Commission, is moving from study phase into construction phase piece by piece. The intersection redesign and the SR 100 access question are still under evaluation. The neighborhood traffic calming is not.
What to Actually Watch Through the Rest of 2026
If you live in West Meade and this corridor is part of your daily loop, whether that's the school run down Harding Pike, a weekend ride on the paved loop past the Allee stone stairs, or a Sunday walk with the dog along Belle Meade Boulevard, here's the practical version of all of this:
The Highway 70/100 redesign is still in the discussion and technical-review stage. Nothing about your daily merge changes yet.
The Lynnwood Boulevard speed cushions are the piece most likely to become visible first, with construction potentially starting before the end of this year.
The Percy Warner access road decision is the one with the highest stakes for anyone who rides the mountain bike trails, since Metro Planning's own preferred option runs through the same terrain those trails currently occupy. Friends of Warner Parks remains the group tracking that fight most closely on the conservation side.
None of these three threads is really separate. They are pieces of one plan to solve a traffic problem that Cheekwood and Percy Warner's own popularity created, a plan that happens to run straight through both the intersection you complain about and the trail you ride to clear your head.
The Rest of the Neighborhood Keeps Moving Regardless
Not everything in West Meade is tied up in road studies. The West Meade Neighborhood Association still runs its annual Market Day at Brook Hollow Baptist Church, a Saturday morning of local vendors and neighbors that has nothing to do with SR 100 access points. And if you haven't made the short walk to the West Meade Waterfall off Jocelyn Hollow, it's still there, quietly protected since Tennessee Parks and Greenways Foundation raised the funds to purchase it in 2013 and sold the land to Metro at a reduced cost the following year. Some parts of this neighborhood take a decade of planning studies to change. Others have already been settled for over a decade and just sit there, waiting for you to notice them again.
If you're watching this corridor for reasons beyond your commute, whether that's because you're weighing what road and park access changes mean for a property near Highway 100 or you just want a market read that accounts for the infrastructure conversation rather than ignoring it, that's the kind of question The Costigan Group fields regularly from West Meade owners and buyers. Book A Consultation and we'll walk through what we're actually seeing on the ground.
