Atlanta is pretty notorious for its crippling highway traffic. After all, it’s where four interstates, and Georgia State Route 400 all intersect, dumping a million people into the city in the mornings, and a million people all trying to get out in the afternoons, all while another million people are just passing through going north, south, west, and sometimes east at varying times of the day. These highways are mostly neglected by law enforcement since most cops don’t want to bother getting tangled in the web of traffic in their own right and the massive number of regular HOV violators is about the largest untapped revenue generator as a college football playoff would be. All in all, it leads to a regular conclusion of standstill traffic, unhappy commuters, and a whole lot of people hating Atlanta.
As bad as the highways are however, the surface streets of Atlanta aren’t much better. In fact, I would wager to even say that they’re even worse, because at least on the highway, it’s often clear to what is causing traffic, which is usually a fuckton of idiot drivers who do nothing but swerve and cut in front of everyone, causing everyone to regularly fan out in all lanes to try and get to their desired exits before everyone else does, even if it jeopardizes the safety of everybody else.
But on the surface streets, the traffic isn’t so much often the fact that people are fucking retarded behind the wheels of their cars as much as it is the fact that Atlanta simply has poorly-timed traffic lights, all over the entire fucking city. I haven’t met too many people astute enough to realize this, but it’s absolutely true; just look at the picture up above.
This is an intersection that’s regularly marred and clogged by the fact that two lights close in proximity are completely off-sync, and there’s LITRALLY. Anywhere between 2-7 seconds that they’ll be green at the same time, all depending on if some retard Georgia Tech students are jamming on the crosswalk buttons or not. But like clockwork, it’s almost harmonious to how one light will be red while the other is green and vice versa, with maybe only two to three cars in each lane being capable of making it through the intersection, often times, at the risk of additionally running the light, out of desperation.
“So why don’t you take a different route then, if this route is so terrible??”
Because there aren’t many alternate routes. Crossing over the I-75/I-85 Downtown Connector is about as difficult as doing the speeder bike levels in Battletoads. But there’s really no way around it. There are LITRALLY. Only five routes to cross over the Connector; one of them involves cutting through Georgia Tech which is a chore in itself, and the other four turn into massive choke points, because they all run parallel with the Connector, with exit ramps to get on/off of them, meaning they become collateral damage to the nightmare traffic from the highways.
And all of them have an array of mistimed lights surrounding them as well. Just about as bad as the one pictured above at Georgia Tech and North Avenue. But this was a perfect example caught in photos of just how bad it is around here in Atlanta.
