I got lucky.
I heard the forecasts calling for 1 to 2 inches of snow in Atlanta starting after noon. But I also heard the forecasts saying things would be worst south of the city, as well as the scoffs that winter weather around here rarely seems to turn out as badly as we’re warned. I may or may not have heard some of those scoffs come out of my own mouth.
And so, apparently like a lot of people Tuesday, I went about my business as if things would be normal-ish. I finally headed to my car in a downtown parking deck around quarter to 2 — apparently like a lot of people.
But unlike a lot of people, I found a way home that didn’t take five or seven or nine or more hours. It took me only about 90 minutes to go 7 miles — four times longer than it should’ve taken, but less than a fourth as long as it took thousands and thousands and thousands of others.
Like I said, I got lucky.
Tuesday showed us a city and state at both their best and their worst. At their best: teachers staying at schools overnight with stranded students; public workers and first responders working day-night-day to reach people in need; businesses and churches and others opening their doors to those who couldn’t make it home; Good Samaritans using social media and old-fashioned shoe leather to bring help to the helpless.
At their worst: Well, you know.
State and local leaders were seemingly a step or two behind the pace of the weather forecasting. School officials — maybe gun-shy after taking heat for closing schools earlier this month just because of the cold air? — kept classes going a couple of hours, or maybe a day, too long, and then sent buses full of kids out into the great white gridlock. Businesses and individual people took the warnings equally unseriously. Frustrated motorists blocked intersection after intersection through red light after red light, and that was before they got stuck on the interstates.
To those who say an inch or two of snow shouldn’t paralyze a major city: You’re right. But let’s be clear about why we were paralyzed, and what that means.
A given stretch of asphalt is designed to handle a certain number of cars over a certain amount of time. Try to cram more cars into that stretch in that time, and you get gridlock.
To which anyone who’s lived here longer than a minute might say: Duh!
Bottlenecks, choke points, lane mergers, curves and grades, too few alternatives to the major thoroughfares — we got hit in all the usual spots.
In that respect, our snowy gridlock was the worst (let’s hope) manifestation of our daily traffic woes. Throw in several hundred wrecks in a matter of hours, and it wouldn’t have mattered if the city and state had 10,000 snow plows and salt spreaders on hand. They could only do good where they could go.
But we can only build our way out of this less-than-annual occurrence up to a point. It would be impractical, probably impossible, to create enough capacity for everyone in metro Atlanta to go somewhere else all at once, as we more or less tried to do Tuesday.
If having too many cars in the same place(s) at once was the problem, we have to ask why the people we elect to sort out these things didn’t have, or execute, a plan to keep that from happening.
Maybe Gov. Nathan Deal, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and other local-government officials across the region acted as quickly as possible on the information available. Maybe they didn’t. But what I’d really like to know is:
What happens if there is no warning?
All of us can imagine any number of situations, sinister, natural or accidental, that could prompt a sudden, mass exodus from a heavily populated part of metro Atlanta. Based on what happened Tuesday, it’s all too easy to imagine an official response that approximates Kevin Bacon’s character in “Animal House” yelling “All is well!” amid chaos.
For everyone like me who got lucky Tuesday, there’s at least another person who didn’t. “Good luck” isn’t much of a plan.
