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 Much of their traffic failures have to do with the insane and outdated notions of a city.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.