Cars line up before Northside Drive on West Paces Ferry Road, one of a few east-to-west arteries.
Buckhead traffic bothers me.
It is not the traffic itself per say. I am firmly in the camp of former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell, current Buckhead “mayor” and president of the Buckhead Coalition. He is fond of saying there are towns in Georgia without traffic. They also do not have the commerce, the shopping, the restaurants, etc. You get the picture. We endure traffic because we live in a place where people want to be.
My issue is the shear lack of east-to-west arteries. West Wesley Road, the street on which I grew up not far from the corner of Habersham Road, is such a road. Cars flew up and down it even when I was a child. It was more of a highway than a residential street. Now we live off West Paces Ferry Road, which is another one. Cars would fly down it if that were an option. Instead cars have to sit and sit and sit some more because of the volume and the lack of alternatives.
We all make do, learning the traffic patterns and adjusting accordingly. If that means leaving 30 minutes before you should just to avoid the school rush, so be it. My mother would not get on a road in Atlanta between 3 and 7 p.m. on a Friday.
I have long railed against this odd phenomenon, the lack of east-to-west or west-to-east roads that would alleviate the overcrowding on the few we have. I heard something two weeks ago that I have long known but which never quite clicked as being the reason.
At an elevation of 1,050 feet, Atlanta is the highest city east of the Mississippi River. Nowhere near the cities of Colorado, but being in the East, that is pretty high up. What is more, the city is located on the Eastern Continental Divide. If a raindrop falls to the west of Peachtree Ridge, it will find its way to the Gulf of Mexico. If a raindrop falls to the east, it will end up in the Atlantic Ocean. But what does that have to do with traffic? Everything.
The tidbit came from the executive director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, Douglas Hooker, during a question-and-answer session following his speech with the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta. Someone asked why downtown Atlanta did not have several boulevards leading to a centralized area similar to cities like Paris and London. The answer; geography.
It is often said our sprawl is a result of Atlanta having no natural barriers to growth. That is a bit of misnomer, Hooker said. The city’s elevation and that ridge have resulted in Atlanta’s growth mainly in those directions. I once posited that Atlanta grew toward Buckhead because of the land holdings of the Collier family. I was wrong. Atlanta grew north because that was the easiest path.
Evidence abounds. Take Peachtree Road and Peachtree Battle Avenue, for example. The Peachtree Battle Shopping Center is known by generations of Atlantans as “the hole” because of the precipitous fall off from Peachtree. On the other side lies the low-lying athletic field behind E. Rivers Elementary School.
West Wesley to East Wesley Road, which is bisected by Peachtree, is another example. West Wesley goes up to Peachtree, and then East Wesley descends back down on the other side. The same happens at Peachtree and Pharr Road. Indeed West Wesley climbs and falls along its entire route. During an ice storm several years ago, I learned this the hard way when I attempted to drive up the hill near the back entrance to The Westminster Schools. I ended up sliding backward into a ditch.
The path of least resistance in the Atlanta’s continued evolution was to stay atop the ridges, which makes a grand central area fed by many arteries nearly impossible. It also contributes to our ongoing traffic conundrum.
Read more: Neighbor Newspapers – Column Elevation to blame for lack of east west roads
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