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Whenever I see these leaders planning how to force people out of their cars, I almost never see anyone who works an 8-5 schedule and has to deal with peak hour traffic or has to deal with arranging picking up kids. And of course, they don't use mass transit. In Atlanta even school district chiefs have drivers.
In my region, in peak..which lasts a while, if you are lucky enough to have the work and home location that matches up with transit, it is faster and predictable. When I worked in downtown SF, I took the bus most if the time. It was in schedule within 5 minutes around 90% of the time. There were only 2-3 incidents when the ride took 10 minutes longer than scheduled during my 4 years of commuting, and those days something pretty crazy happened. Driving to work is so unpredictable. It takes me anywhere from 35-60 minutes in the am, and I leave later to miss peak traffic. Sadly, peak for us is from 7-9:30 on most routs, and in the pm 4-6:30. Some routes that peak time starts at 5:45a and 3p.
Why does the OP ..........REFUSE ......to acknowledge/mention ice ?
It doesn't fit his narrative. Nor does acknowledging that problems should be expected in a southern city which has little equipment or clearing chemicals or experience dealing with this weather.
You'd have to be nuts to cross Buford Highway in Atlanta mid-block. The driver wasn't punished because the kid ran in front of his car. There was nothing he could do.
Agreed, they don't call it "Death by Buford Highway" for nothing!
I am glad a few people from Atlanta are participating in this thread. The link about that accident posted in this thread is an opinion piece and very "conspiracy-theory" ish. I have read other, hard news articles about it, but I had no idea the road was like a superhighway.
The city of Atlanta proper has a good rail/bus transit system. In the suburbs public transit is mainly bus only.
The fact is that most people still prefer to drive, however. As long as that is the case, they're going to have to put up with huge traffic jams from time to time.
From the opening of GA-400 in 1992 until last year, Atlanta had not added a single freeway lane or even added an exit to a freeway. They added a new exit on 400 last year and opened HOT lanes in Gwinnet County. That's over 20 years with no expansion and basically doubling the population. I don't think there were any expansions of arterial roads inside I-285 either (runs about 10-12 miles from downtown). Certainly there weren't any significant ones. And they did take out some lanes in places to do "traffic calming." As for mass transit, they have added just one stop on their MARTA rail system in that time frame.
It is completely astonishing that the Atlanta region's transportation infrastructure has remained almost exactly the same size while its population (and it transportation needs) has more than doubled over the last 20 years.
As for why there haven't been any expansions of arterial roads inside of the I-285 Perimeter...
...The Georgia Department of Transportation has basically adopted an unwritten policy that there will be no new road capacity added inside of the I-285 Perimeter due to the exceptionally road expansion-averse political climate that exists there where the Intown population gets extremely angry when money is spent on road expansion instead of transit.
Heck, busy winding 2-lane surface roads like Mount Paran Rd, Paces Ferry Road/West Paces Ferry Road, Mount Vernon Road/Mount Vernon Highway, Glenridge Road/Johnson Ferry Road, etc, would likely have been good candidates for expansion into 4-6 lane arterial thoroughfares if they weren't lined with thickly-wooded heavy upscale residential development while running through some of the most-affluent areas in the Southeastern U.S.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bu2
Contrast that with Houston in the same time that added significant capacity to (off the top of my head) 7 of their arterial freeways, added 3 brand new freeways/toll roads, added capacity to their inner loop 610, completed the last segment and added lanes to the north of west and started construction of additional lanes in the southwest of their 2nd loop Beltway 8 and started work on their 3rd loop, the Grand Parkway. And they have been building a 20+ mile light rail system.
It is amazing and quite a contrast that a large metro region like Houston (which has about roughly the same regional population of Atlanta and has experienced the same kind of explosive population growth of Atlanta) is aggressively expanding BOTH its road and transit network while Atlanta's regional and state leadership basically continues to pretend that its increasingly overwhelming regional transportation capacity issues don't exist.
(...The reasons (and excuses) that I've personally heard for not investing more in the Atlanta region's transportation infrastructure include:
"Atlanta doesn't need any new roads because Atlanta already has too many roads";
and my personal favorite: "Atlanta doesn't need any transit because Atlanta is not New York and people moved to Atlanta from the New York and the Northeast to get away from transit";
...other personal favorites include: "There is no need for transit lines connecting Atlanta with its suburbs because NOBODY commutes to Atlanta anymore" and "NOBODY will EVER ride transit if we build it in Metro Atlanta";
...and my personal favorite: "Transit is part of an evil international plot helmed by the United Nations to subvert the American entire way-of-life and install a one-world government"
...these are actually some of the real reasons and excuses that actual political leaders have given for not investing more in the transportation infrastructure of the Atlanta region during a time of explosive population growth in the Atlanta region.)
There is also a strong NIMBY attitude in the Atlanta area in addition to the anti-road sentiment in Atlanta proper. A governor basically got elected because he killed the "Northern Arc" which would have been a 2nd loop across the northern suburbs. People didn't want a freeway interfering with their rural way of life and creating more development. Of course, development came anyway and the traffic in the north is horrible. Arterial roads leading to GA-400 are packed instead of having some of that on a freeway.
And a planned extension of MARTA in the TSPLOST (which was defeated) got quickly turned into slow, street level light rail because people didn't want MARTA following an existing active rail corridor where it has been projected to go for decades.
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