Most cities I've been to are located near a body of water. Chicago has its lake and river. New York has two rivers, Pittsburgh has three. Here in Atlanta, where you'd expect to find a river, you'll stumble across the confluence of three major interstates; a tangle of six-to-eight lane highways that literally crucify the city of Atlanta right at its heart. The city is then surrounded by the ominously-named "perimeter", another ribbon of six lanes that allows suburban drivers to move from one major road to another without going into town.
The effect of all this highway is that for residents of the city itself, representing only about 1/10th of the Atlanta area's inhabitants, getting from one side of town to the other involves finding the two or three routes that go over the interstate-- something that is bound to be difficult on a rainy rush hour. Today, an eight mile drive through town took 45 minutes, mostly against the direction of traffic.
People here spend more time in their cars than almost any metropolitan area. We're fifth in the country for bad driving times. The only places that are worse are DC, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A. But somethow people are willing to traverse distances upwards of 50 miles each way in order to balance a suburban lifestyle with the economic necessity of coming into the city for work. There appears to be no limit to the amount of driving that Atlantans are willing to undertake. We can't do much about the lack of natural barriers that allow suburbs to stretch on forever. We're not likely to change the appetites of rural county developers for more plastic housing. We shouldn't do anything about the area's population boom, which brings more opportunity for all. But we need to find other ways of moving people around than roads.
OK, the list of places with worse driving times are: DC, San Francisco, Chicago, and L.A. With the exception of the latter, all of these places have real, viable alternatives to driving, and L.A. is heavlily invested in changing that.
Free market conservatives have somehow conflated building more roads with more freedom, both economic and personal. Economically, they see a future of pay-as-you-go toll lanes, making the already 8-lane "downtown connector" a (16 lane?!) double-decker, and endorsing their own multi-billion dollar "big dig" to create a tunnel system for more highway traffic to move through and around Atlanta. Personally, the idea of anything but spending time in a car as an individual "rational actor" as a loss of choice, a reduction of individual freedoms, and the tyranny of the state. Personally, for me, there is nothing freeing about stop-and-go traffic, summertime asthma attacks, and spending my morning in aggrivation at my fellow man instead of reading the paper on a train or bus. Aesthetically there is nothing worse than an area choked by blacktop and cars. Economically, losing time in traffic is losing money, losing the chance for powering our movement on electricity generated from American coal and gas to Arab crude is unpatriotic, losing trains to roads is losing the opportunity for creating city centers around suburbs-- something that has been a large part of the economic growth of the DC area over the 31 years since the Metro system began its service.
MARTA, the Metro Altanta Rapid Transit Authority is also commonly referred to as, Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta. If "N" was somehow a vowel, I'm sure it'd be slipped into that acronym in place of the "A". As an observation, riding MARTA is a terrifying experience for many suburbanites, accustomed to seeing the same faces every day. The city is viewed by many as a sprawling ghetto, supported only be welfare checks, even though in fact, the tax dollars flow against traffic. It is no surprise, then, that MARTA is the only major transit system in the country that receives not a dollar of state subsidies. The outlying areas have refused to allow an extension of its service into their jurisdictions, instead starting their own independent bus lines into the city while calling for more state money to build more roads in their back yards.
MARTA started at around the same time as DC's Metro. This is truly a tale of two cities-- one that chose to take the opportunity of an extensive train system, and one that saw the whole enterprise as some sort of socialist joke. Getting around either city by car is difficult, but people have a choice in DC and little or none here. In DC, millions choose Metro every day, while underfunded MARTA trains ride by half-empty on their tracks over stalled traffic.
To say that roads are somehow the free market alternative to trains is ludicrous. The idea that trains should be profitable while roads are never expected to be is wrong-headed, and the idea that privatizing roads will somehow change the math is just plain wrong. There are some things in life where money isn't made, it's spent. When done right, they're worth it. Tax dollars will be spent one way or another. Spending tax dollars on trains instead of roads creates more desireable city centers over the long strips of boring suburban desert we see around roads. For the dollar, it can move more people with less hassle and pollution than any roadway could ever offer. Transit systems, in one form or another, have become a necessary component of any large city. It's a fact of life, and not a bad thing.
Atlanta, and Georgia need to invest in trains. That they have not is a testament to the continued shortsightedness and racism that pervades the south. As other sprawling cities such as Charlotte, Denver and Phoenix all attempt to tackle these problems sensibly, it really makes me worry about this region's long term outlook. What employer wants to sit in traffic when they have a choice?
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