Like every Northerner, I’ve been doing some eye-rolling at the entire city of Atlanta for dealing so poorly with a couple of inches of snow. But a great article in Politico helped to put Atlanta’s crisis in perspective. Much of their traffic failures have to do with the insane and outdated notions of a city.
The old lines that separate city and suburbs don’t make much sense in our modern metropolitan world. They can be blamed for Detroit’s bankruptcy and a whole host of other problems. The New York City metropolitan area encompassed three states and hundreds of small towns. The old lines make the management of traffic flow, taxation, and other political services difficult.
There have been calls over time to redefine our political boundaries to make sense of modern life, but it is a political non-starter. But maybe those abandoned cars on the highways of Atlanta will force us to revisit those ideas.
Apt. 11d 
That article doesn’t make much of a case. Would a unitary government have built a different highway system? How well were the trains running in the snow? No evidence is presented on these issues.
Even if divided government were the problem (sounds like Edward Bellamy), I don’t meet too many suburban New Jerseyites who want to start paying New York taxes, or upgrade their houses to conform to New York City building codes, or send their children to New York City schools. I presume suburban Atlantans feel about the same, and will put up with a snowpocalypse once per decade if that is the price.
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Georgia should have cancelled school, and told non-essential state employees to stay home. This storm did not sneak up on Atlanta. Somehow, Texas managed to cancel school ahead of time, so there weren’t pictures of school buses stuck in snow: http://www.galvestondailynews.com/free/article_d9bed1a6-8782-11e3-849c-001a4bcf6878.html.
Somehow in Massachusetts we manage to deal with storms by taking a commonsense approach of not trying to hold school during an ice storm. The governor asks towns, cities and businesses to take precautions. I fail to see that centralizing government would have had any advantages. The state did not take reasonable precautions before the storm. You’re assuming Big Management would be prudent. That has not been proven.
I’ve driven in Atlanta in summer. It’s hard to get off the roads in summer. They’ve built such big highways, the surrounding streets can’t take the volume.
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I think the point of the linked article wasn’t that Big Management would be more prudent, but that the big highways that are hard to get off of even in the summer (and the absence of alternatives to these) are the result of fractured local politics. For reasons of class and racial politics, everything for local transportation was made dependent on those big freeways so that any small problem there shuts the whole thing down.
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New York and it’s multi-state suburbs have agreed to some form of coordination of their transportation relationships, haven’t they? Isn’t that part of what institutions like the Port Authority with it’s joint management of bridges is supposed to be about?
I don’t see that Atlanta’s response to what is, for them, a decade+ weather emergency is significantly different from any other region’s handling of a similar time scale emergency for them (say, Hurricane Sandy — I am still surprised at how poorly the NYU hospitals were prepared).
It’s generally foolish to make the comparison between the regularly expected 2 inch snows in the Northeast to the response of Atlanta to what is for them a rare event. Of course they don’t have plans in place.
But, I also think it’s becoming generally recognized that Atlanta’s transportation infrastructure is at a breaking point where it becomes economically unviable to make the decisions folks have made in the past about where to work and live.
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I live in Wake County, NC its 860SQ Miles. We have 900k+ people. We have 70 plows for that entire area…70! (and no one has plow kits for their trucks like NE) We’ve been out of school 3 days and won’t be going back tomorrow, because none of the side roads have been plowed. They are covered in sheets of ice. Government here depends on a warm up to melt secondary roads and its currently 22 degrees.
Why are we going to pay to prepare for winter storms that happen 1-2x every decade? We had exactly what happened in ATL about 10 years ago. Kids stuck in school over night, 1000+ accidents, 10+ hour commutes. For us, they canceled Tuesday and not a flake fell until 6pm. Its the south, we’re prepared for heat, not snow. And no one wants to pay for public transportation..Its a catch 22 for growing southern cities, we’ll be leaving soon.
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