Summer in Atlanta: sweltering temperatures, smog, mosquitoes ... and an easier commute?
There may be a consolation for the duress that summer brings: the absence of those yellow buses with their flapping, red stop signs that arrest traffic for miles, and of parents scurrying to and fro, with their kids in the backseat.
While it's not technically summer yet, it certainly feels like it. Besides the scorching heat, there is this: The students in the major metro public schools are done for the year.
For drivers like Steve Robertson of Snellville, that means three months of commuting bliss. The trucking company executive can leave 15 to 30 minutes later for his 40-mile commute to downtown Atlanta because the traffic flows more smoothly.
"The summers are much more pleasurable driving," he said.
The Georgia Department of Transportation could offer no figures to support his observation, but he isn't the only driver to notice how the roads seem less clogged now that the kids are home for summer. DeKalb County closed its schools May 20. Atlanta, Decatur and Cobb, Gwinnett and Fulton counties shut their doors last week.
"You don't have any lighter traffic," said Jill Goldberg, a spokeswoman for GDOT. But she said drivers may be noticing fewer bottlenecks. "Its just that the [commuting] times are not as compressed."
Parents who would be scurrying to a school with a child in tow can skip that extra trip and head straight to work, relieving congestion on surface streets. They may also hit the interstates at different times, spreading the traffic volume over a greater period.
"For my commute, it's almost always lighter when there's no school," said Mack Littleton, of Smyrna. He often works from home and commutes to his office at a telecommunication company in Alpharetta two or three times a week, taking an on ramp to I-285 near his house. He noticed the difference right away Tuesday morning.
"Sometimes I'll pull out on my road two and a half miles from the highway and it's a parking lot," he said. On Tuesday, he didn't encounter a traffic jam until just before the on ramp.
"It was less than normal," he said, adding: "It was still pretty bad."
The Clean Air Campaign says half the ingredients in smog come from tailpipes. Spokesman Brian Carr said the summer, when kids are out of school and parents have more flexibility, is a good time to try out carpooling. Lori Swilley is among those who tried it and liked it. She's been carpooling from Snellville to Suwanee for a few years and said the summer driving is definitely easier on her route.
Swilley knows all about schools since she works in administration for the Gwinnett public school system. She said there are 27,000 employees, most of whom stopped driving to school Friday when the system shut down for summer break. There are 160,000 students, many of them in high school, with their own cars, she noted. They're not all driving in the morning anymore, either. And either are the county school buses, which log 100,000 miles a day.
It all added up to a swift commute for Swilley and her two driving companions Tuesday morning.
"We were like a good 15 to 20 minutes earlier this morning because of the fact that there was no traffic," she said. She and her colleagues plan to sleep in another 15 minutes for the rest of the summer break.
Alas, these drivers haven't noticed much change in the evening traffic.
"The evenings are a little different; I don't know why," said Robertson, the trucking executive.
Swilley figures it's because people are out and about on summer evenings, doing things they don't do in the winter.
"So definitely, the bonus is in the morning," she said.
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