Atlanta, meet the city that is eating your lunch. Dallas may have high poverty and a hated football team, but it’s way out in front of our town on other measures that count.
The Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex finished the disastrous 2000s with 5 percent more jobs than it started with; metro Atlanta suffered a net loss. On unemployment, DFW never even hit double digits. We’re barely out of them.
Mass transit? The Metroplex now has a four times more miles of transit track than metro Atlanta has.
And traffic: Atlanta can barely spell toll road. Dallas already has six. And an average commute time that’s 14 percent shorter than ours.
Texas’ SAT scores: higher. Texas’ high school graduation rates: Higher. Etc.
Don’t count Atlanta out: We have Hartsfield-Jackson. They don’t.
So. If you’re a CEO trying to decide between Atlanta and Dallas as the new headquarters for your company, where would you go?
Throughout this week, the AJC publishes an eight-part series on metro Atlanta's 2012 turning point . Get the in-depth story on how our region ranks with nine of its metro competitors around the country. Find out who's in the lead (it isn't us) and why. It's a story you'll get only by picking up a copy of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution or logging on to the paper's iPad app. Subscribe today.
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