How the Car Destroyed Atlanta and the Future of the American City
BY JONATHAN ROBISON
Upon his return to the White House after delivering his State of the Union address to Congress on January 28, I imagine President Obama received an upsetting briefing outlining the chaotic situation in Atlanta. The nation’s ninth largest metropolitan area was paralyzed by just over two inches of snow. Although the crisis seemed a result of the rare bout of extreme weather, it was actually a human created disaster long in the making. As soon as snow started falling, everyone in the city got in their cars at the same time to head home under slick driving conditions. As the snow continued and more drivers crowded onto the city’s highways, the clogged roads became impassible. As a result, motorists were stranded on the highways for over twelve hours, trapped customers slept in the aisles of grocery stores, and thousands of children were stuck in school or on school buses overnight. Pictures from that day were reminiscent of shots of abandoned Atlanta from The Walking Dead. Atlanta, a city of over five million people, had been brought to its knees by what the rest of the nation considers a dusting of snow. Therefore, the obvious question is, how could Atlanta be so unprepared? The Frostbelters amongst us might be tempted to write off the situation in Atlanta as just a bunch of sweet-tea-drinking Southerners incapable of handling anything below 50 degrees. However, in a region where weather like this is so infrequent, this event was more than just the result of bad weather and poor government preparation. The crisis brings to light deeper, long-term problems with Atlanta’s transportation infrastructure.
The first time I visited Atlanta, there were many surprises. The most jarring was the size of the highways. Near my home in Boston, highways are at most three lanes in each direction. But in Atlanta, I-75/I-85 just north of Jackson-Hartsfield Airport is more than double that — seven lanes in each direction. Yet despite their gargantuan size, Atlanta’s highways are extremely congested. After sitting in traffic at 11:30 on a Friday morning, 10:15 PM on Saturday, and 2:30 PM on Sunday, I learned from personal experience that Atlanta is known for its random but common traffic jams.
Atlanta is a prime example of the explosive growth that Sunbelt cities experienced during the 1990s and 2000s. Between 1990 and 2012, two million people fleeing the cold weather (which it turns out they didn’t quite escape) and dying Rust Belt cities of the Northeast and Midwest moved to Atlanta, causing a population growth of over 77 percent. In comparison, Metro Boston and Metro New York both only grew by roughly 11 percent during that same time period. Nearly all of these new Atlantan residents moved into cookie-cutter developments of expansive McMansions in new suburbs that pushed development farther and farther beyond “the Perimeter” I-285 beltway.
Atlanta’s low density, suburban subdivision centered design makes it extremely difficult to live in Atlanta without a car. Metropolitan Atlanta includes not just the city of Atlanta, but also 28 counties (or a total of 10,500 square miles — an area the size of my home state of Massachusetts) with a population of 5.46 million people and a density of about 630 people per square mile.This low density makes it almost impossible to reliably walk to any destination in Atlanta. In fact, Walkscore.com, a website that scores how walkable cities and neighborhoods are based on what percentage of daily errands can be done by walking, ranked Atlanta as the 21st most pedestrian friendly large city in the U.S. Walkscore gave Atlanta a walk score of 46 and a transit score (based on how well a city is served by mass transit) of 43 out of 100.This score means that the majority of peoples’ daily business requires a car. New York City, for comparison, ranked first with a walk score of 88 and transit score of 81. St. Louis has an overall walk score of 60 and a transit score of 45. Given the common complaint amongst us students that you cannot go anywhere in St. Louis without a car, think about what Atlanta must be like.
It would be unfair, however, to say that Atlanta has not tried to improve its public transit system. In the 1970s, Atlanta started building a transportation system called MARTA (the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority), which now consists of four rail lines and 138 bus lines. On average in 2012, MARTA carried 422,000 people daily, a 4.72 percent decrease from the year before. Of the 28 counties that make up metro Atlanta, MARTA services reach only 1.7 million people in two counties. Thus, in this sprawling city of millions, only a small fraction of the people who can actually use the public transportation system do so, and the system itself only reaches a small fraction of the city. That leaves millions of Atlantans relying on cars to travel. According to the New York Times, 80 percent of people in Atlanta drive alone to work, and only five percent use public transport to commute.
As in many cities, race has played a significant role in building and expanding Atlanta’s mass transit. The local “joke” in Atlanta is that MARTA stands for “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta,” reflecting the attitude that prevailed when MARTA was initially created in the early ’70s, and most likely still lingers today. Like when MetroLink was built here in St. Louis, Atlantan suburbanites were worried that building public transit would import crime to the suburbs and therefore did not support funding to build or extend lines of MARTA. This is why MARTA has been so ineffective throughout its existence. Today, less than 5 percent of white people use MARTA regularly, while 30 percent of black people do. As Atlanta becomes more racially diverse, these issues will continue to play a large part in its transportation planning.
Atlanta’s slow and limited public transit system and dependency on the car is furthering a growing national problem: the death of the American Dream. In a Harvard report on income mobility in 50 metro regions, Atlanta scored second to last. Of all Atlantan children born in the bottom fifth income percentile, only 4.5 percent were likely to enter the top fifth income percentile. In a July 2013 editorial in the New York Times commenting on this report, writer Paul Krugman connected Atlanta’s poor public transportation system with its weak social mobility. He writes:
…Atlanta is the Sultan of Sprawl, even more spread out than other major Sun Belt cities… an effective public transportation system [is] nearly impossible to operate even if politicians were willing to pay for it, which they aren’t. As a result, disadvantaged workers often find themselves stranded; there may be jobs available somewhere, but they literally can’t get there.
While a myriad of other factors influence Atlanta’s income mobility, transportation issues can play a surprisingly important role in deciding who does and who does not have access to opportunities.
Recently, Atlanta has made further efforts to improve its transit system, although progress is slow. On July 31, 2012, Atlantans went to the polls to vote on a referendum to raise sales taxes by one percent. This measure would have provided $8.5 billion over the next decade to build and improve transit and road projects, but the measure failed.Additionally, Atlanta is building a new streetcar system, but critics point out that the system only connects the tourist destinations near Centennial Olympic Park (the Georgia Aquarium and World of Coca-Cola) to the tourist destination of the MLK Jr. National Historic Site, so its purpose is not really for commuters. Nonetheless, these attempts are a start.
Atlanta’s recent brush with snowy weather teaches us an important lesson. The real human disaster here, the one that will continue long after the snow melts, is that we built our cities so poorly for the future. As Atlanta Magazine said in August 2012,
At the heart of the rot eating at metro Atlanta is the Mother of All Mistakes: the failure to extend MARTA into the suburbs… As we look at the future of Atlanta, there is no question that battling our notorious traffic and sprawl is key to the metro area’s potential vitality.
As a soon to be Atlantan, I could not agree more. Neither Atlanta nor only American cities are alone or extraordinarily unique in this problem. These sprawling, unending cities all around the world are not going anywhere. It is time we fix them and make them more efficiently serve human needs. Increasing access to public transportation is a crucial place to start.