Making the case for traffic experts during Atlanta road jams

As artificial intelligence revolutionizes how tasks are completed, many people are pleading their cases for why their jobs are important. Too many are losing.

I believe the quick correlation and summarization of data via algorithms is a strong shortcut. But I also believe that the true experts and passionate reporters on the traffic beat can make one heckuva difference, especially in metro Atlanta.

As the school year started and drivers tiptoed into new routines or back into old ones a couple of theoretical bear traps snapped down this past Tuesday in Cobb County.

Human context surrounding big road incidents made a difference. Reporters told commuters on I-75, I-285 and the surrounding roads that they were not in for their normal back-to-school-week drive.

While school traffic is largely confined to non-freeways, interstate traffic does impact the school commute. Parents are returning to work routines. And when interstates back up, the adjacent surface streets do, too.

Three tractor trailers and a passenger car tangled on I-75 northbound south of Delk Road (Exit 261) just before 6 a.m. on Aug. 4, right as school buses began their routes. The melee left just the fast lane open on I-75 North.

This took nearly two hours to clear, jamming I-75 North back before I-285, heavily slowing I-285 both ways, and causing parallel roads U.S. 41 and Powers Ferry (and others) to move far slower than normal. Happy first week, kids!

Moments like these are when live traffic experts matter the most. At my morning gig on 11Alive, Rachel Cox-Rosen dispatched photojournalist Stephen Boissy and me to the I-75 scene. We broadcast from the backups on Powers Ferry and Delk roads before watching the scene play out from the other side of I-75.

Cox-Rosen and I described in detail the array of first responders so drivers would get the sense of how long it might take to clear the crash.

Again, this was no ordinary Tuesday.

Then Cox-Rosen found another jam on I-75 southbound at the South 120 Loop (Exit 263), where four or five vehicles and a box truck tangled. With multiple left lanes blocked, I-75 South — the predominant rush hour direction — was now also in horrid shape.

Using Georgia Department of Transportation cameras and our mapping technology, we were able to tell drivers how long alternate routes would take and show the severity of the wrecks and delays. As I-75 opened, we told drivers the freeway actually made more sense than U.S. 41.

Sure, GPS apps can measure this in real time and do a great job of giving the grains of a micro traffic report. But they simply list roads as closed and slow speeds as red. They also lack context and do not even list which lanes are blocked or open.

As the I-75 incidents cleared, I-285 northbound in Cobb County saw a serious motorcycle crash at I-75 (Exit 20) and yet another emergency pothole repair behind it at South Cobb Drive (Exit 15). Each blocked multiple lanes and combined to cause miles of delays, which also sent extra traffic into downtown Atlanta.

Cobb County drivers experienced four long lasting, multilane freeway incidents in the same morning. And traffic reporting experts on multiple Atlanta stations owned it with detail and urgency.

Many broadcasting managers nationwide made a grave mistake in the last 20 years by deciding that expertise was not needed to report traffic. As long as reporters said road names and mentioned crashes and delays — and looked and sounded good while they did it — the traffic hits were adequate.

Then, as deregulation and contraction brought cost-cutting, more stations farmed out traffic coverage to the point that large numbers of radio stations get reports from people not even in their cities. Traffic reports mainly became vehicles to sell spots.