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Tornadoes could happen too. Or something unexpected.
A few years ago a truck caught on fire and took out an overpass
LOL. You don't evacuate for tornadoes, and evacuations for fires, industrial accidents, etc., are localized.
Hurricane evacuations are very organized, as someone mentioned upthread, and take into account existing evacuation routes. You won't have thousands of people clogging Atlanta's freeways.
I will admit that the ice was bad in Atlanta. However, I agree with Komeht about the road network. The bottlenecks are what caused people to abandon their cars. If people were able to use alternate roads, they wouldn't have had to sleep in grocery stores.
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Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
And tractor-trailers that jackknifed on ice caused the bottlenecks.
Are you trying to say there are no roads in Atlanta other than freeways? I saw news clips of plenty of cars abandoned on "alternate" roads.
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Originally Posted by Pete.
Exactly! There aren't many arterial roads in Atlanta for alternate routes, so everyone was stuck.
It looks like the "18-county metro area plans to spend $5.5 billion over the next 30 years expanding arterial roads".
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Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
Give it up. If everyone was stuck, it was the fault of the snow and ice and not of the roads themselves, or their capacity. Had their been dozens of other alternate routes (which, no doubt, creative folks could find), that still would not have stopped semis from jackknifing and blocking the freeway. It would not have prevented the storm from intensifying once everyone was already on the freeway, or any other road.
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Originally Posted by Pete.
I firmly believe that traffic engineering is important, and that a better road network would help Atlanta's terrible traffic even on normal days. We will just have to disagree.
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Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
Of course it will. But it likely would not have helped during that particular snow/ice storm.
Pete has an excellent point that Atlanta's sparse metro road network and lack of 4-6 lane cross-regional arterial routes played a major role in last week's epic traffic jams along with the lack of pre-treatment of the freeways by the Georgia Department of Transportation, who had shifted almost all of its trucks with snow plows and salt and sand spreaders south to Middle Georgia where Georgia officials thought that the storm would hit because of the failure of those in key positions to keep close watch of a weather forecast that had issued a Winter Storm Warning for the Atlanta metro region.
It is the lack of a grid-like network of 4-6 lane north-south and east-west cross-regional alternative through arterial routes that makes the region more dependent (overly-dependent) on its built-out freeway system, something which makes the traffic jams on the freeways even more intense because of the glaring lack of arterial alternatives to the freeway system.
The I-285 Top End Perimeter, an east-west route that was one of the routes that was most-affected by last week's storm and epic traffic jam because no viable parallel east-west cross-regional arterial alternatives.
If a freeway route is jammed or closed in a Dallas or Chicago, motorists may be able to drive as little as a half-mile in either direction away from the affected roadway to use a parallel alternative arterial route.
But in Atlanta, the nearest parallel alternative arterial route to the I-285 Top End Perimeter is at-least 10 miles to the north.
The lack of 4-6 lane cross-regional surface arterial routes and a constrained freeway system means that the few cross-regional routes there are (freeway and arterial) are more heavily-congested than they might be in other large major metro regions of similar size.
The best way to describe the sparse road network of the Atlanta metro region is to visualize a large major metro region of over 6 million inhabitants attempting to use a road network that was only 'designed' to handle the logistical movements of a metro region of about 2.5 million inhabitants, which is what the Atlanta metro region does everyday with its wholly-inadequate road network.
I haven't read all of the preceding 11 pages, but I wanted to reply about the article and the OPs post. This is much more about a southern region that is gets very little snow, and is unprepared respond to it, than anything else. The same situation in the suburbs around Chicago or Minneapolis would have had little to no effect, because the localities involved would have the equipment, experience, and procedures to deal with it, and the drivers would know how to deal with the impact to their commute, and would likely have vehicles better equipped for the situation. Living in NYC, all the exposed transit links tend to get clobbered in a decent snowstorm, especially if the MTA, and the other agencies don't have their act together when these events happen.
This has nothing to do with "sprawl". There is a certain cadre who posts here, the OP among them, who want to blame any negative event that happens in the country on the SFR / auto based topology that has been used in this country since the end of WWII. They're wrong, and they need to drop it.
This is untrue. While both the cities you mention have more equipment, they get big traffic messes as well. A few weeks ago there was a story about a huge mess on I-94, I believe, in the Indiana suburbs of Chicago. I've seen numerous clips of nasty accidents in MN, cause at least partially by the "Bat out of H*ll" drivers there.
Nowhere did I say they would be incident free. But, they're more prepared to deal with the fallout, and they don't bring the entire metropolitan area to a grinding halt.
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Originally Posted by Katiana
This is untrue. While both the cities you mention have more equipment, they get big traffic messes as well. A few weeks ago there was a story about a huge mess on I-94, I believe, in the Indiana suburbs of Chicago. I've seen numerous clips of nasty accidents in MN, cause at least partially by the "Bat out of H*ll" drivers there.
My experience from living in two cities with grid systems and 4-6 lane arterial roads is when the expressway is jammed, the surface roads are also jammed. The issue is that whatever road system you build can only handle so many cars at once. Once you get accidents and disabled vehicles, the capacity plummets.
A city with adequate mass transit at least has alternatives for people to get home or at least closer to home before they have to drive (park-and-ride situation) or get a ride from somebody. 2 inches of snow will NOT shut down a properly designed transit system, though it can obviously shut down a road system. Please stop this rhetoric that transit folks want to take you out of your cars, this sounds too much like saying the Government wants to round up all your guns...nonsense. Even with mass transit it will be most convenient for many/most people to drive on a typical day; however, in some situations like a snow storm you really do need another way to get around, even if it's just for part of the trip for that day. In many cities where snow storms are common people who normally commute by car will often take the train, or drive to the closest park and ride, instead of driving all the way.
When I lived in rural Illinois, there were always articles in the paper about carrying food, blankets, etc in your car in case you got stranded.
Growing up in the snow belt, it was a ritual. Even in Richmond, my wife and I still have the blanket, food and water in the trunk out of habit. Never a bad idea.
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