![]() As with famines in foreign lands, it’s important to understand: It’s not an act of nature or God-this fiasco is manmade from start to finish. It tells us something not just about what’s wrong with one city in America today but what can happen when disaster strikes many places across the country. More than any event I’ve witnessed in two decades of living in and writing about this city, this snowstorm underscores the horrible history of suburban sprawl in the United States and the bad political decisions that drive it. What happened in Atlanta this week is not a matter of Southerners blindsided by unpredictable weather. The Facebook group #SnowedOutAtlanta contained desperate pleas from moms trapped in frigid minivans with toddlers and adults worried about their elderly parents-stuck without medications. Parents en route to pick up kids dismissed from school early were stranded on highways. ![]() A baby was delivered by her father in a car on I-285, the “Perimeter” highway that circles the city. Inevitably, people began to compare the gridlocked cars heading out of downtown Atlanta to the Walking Dead poster, Southerners trapped by a “snowpocalypse” instead of the zombie variety.īut before nightfall, the situation in Atlanta had grown more tragic than comic. I’m sure my Honda’s enshrined on someone’s Facebook page with a witty caption. ATLANTA TRAFFIC HOW TOOh, those Southerners, they don’t know how to drive in the snow! Indeed, as I tried to get home from work Tuesday evening, my tires spinning uselessly in an icy patch just yards from Peachtree Street, a trio of tourists snapped camera-phone pictures and laughed. Surely to everyone else in the world, the staggering sight of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States brought to a standstill by a few flurries seemed comical at first. People who didn’t camp out in supermarket aisles and hotel lobbies were trapped in cars for 10, 16, 20 hours as they tried to make commutes that normally take just 30 minutes. It seemed that the only places open were Waffle House and Home Depot, the former serving hash browns and coffee and the latter opening up its stores as makeshift shelters. More than 2,000 school children were separated from their parents, and spent the night in buses, police stations, or classrooms. Thousands of flights were cancelled at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. On Tuesday, snowfall of just over 2 inches shut down metropolitan Atlanta’s roads, schools, churches, government offices and businesses. She teaches journalism at Emory University and the University of Georgia and tweets at She lives in Atlanta. Louis, for instance, drops by only 14 percent in the mornings and 16 percent in the evenings.īut who would rather live in St.Rebecca Burns is author of three books on Atlanta history. On the other side of the spectrum, the pace of traffic in St. In Boston, between 4 and 6 p.m., traffic slows by 40 percent, down to a sluggish 22 miles per hour, per the study.Īnd in New York City, that same rush-hour period frustrates automobile flow by 38 percent, keeping motorists moving around 22 miles per hour, too. Or at least a sense of relief, since it could be much worse. Geotabīut, as with the heat map, there is some cause for celebration in Atlanta. Data pulled together on the longest day of 2017 suggests Atlanta’s south side is cooler than the heart of the city. Of course, like most cities, Atlanta experiences two major points of congestion throughout the day-although it may sometimes seem like traffic never really lets up.īetween 8 and 9 a.m., Atlanta’s average driving speed dips 20 percent, to 40 miles per hour.Īnd, both in the morning and at night, the brunt of Atlanta’s traffic affliction hits downtown highways-another non-surprise. With a 23 percent speed drop at peak traffic times, Atlanta roadways are still slower on average than those in the Southern California city-38 miles per hour between 5 and 6 p.m., versus San Diego’s 43 miles per hour. Now, Geotab has released another round of data, which uses 7.7 million aggregated reports to illustrate traffic congestion patterns in Atlanta and other traffic hotbeds.Īnalyzing the average cruising speeds of highways in these metropolises, Geotab showed that Atlanta tied with San Diego for the 14th worst speed drop percentage, compared to 18 other major cities. The group’s research found that cars were warming Atlanta more to the north of Interstate 20 than the south- not a shocker, given area growth patterns. In August, transportation-focused data analytics company Geotab released heat maps showing how automobile use in major metro cities was impacting hyper-local temperatures. ![]() ![]() There’s nothing novel about knocking Atlanta for having chronically bad traffic, but there is something cathartic about being able to visualize when and where roads are most liable to clog. ![]()
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