As a recent transplant from the Midwest, I’ve quickly come to enjoy many things about the quality of life in metro Atlanta — not the least of which is this warm February weather.
Of the many things I could highlight about living here, that’s one I mention often to my Ohio friends and family.
But then they ask me about the traffic.
In my personal experience, and I’ll bet in yours, Atlanta, more than anything else, seems to be known for its traffic congestion.
That’s not good.
Of course, many of us battle traffic each working day, joining the hundreds of thousands for the morning and evening commute.
Just one fender-bender on a key commuter route and thousands of us are late for work or a meeting or a family dinner. So the quality-of-life impact of our growing traffic woes are obvious to us.
But the most serious implication of Atlanta’s traffic woes is not personal. It is business growth.
When you talk to corporate relocation experts and business leaders inside and outside metro Atlanta, the long-term implications of our traffic problems — and our growing reputation for being unable or unwilling to address them — get downright scary.
Of course, Atlanta’s explosive growth over the past few decades has made it one of the nation’s most important cities. That momentum and other advantages — the airport and higher education institutions — can carry us forward for some time. We’ve had recent announcements of businesses moving here or close by — and many companies already here feel it is essential to keep a base in the Southeast’s most important city.
But a day of reckoning may come, and if it does, there will be no announcement.
Traffic can negatively impact business in many ways. Here are a couple:
● Limiting the labor pool. Metro Atlanta is a huge market with many workers, including well-educated professionals. On paper that’s an attractive place to bring a growing or large business. But because of our commuting patterns and traffic, a business has access to only a portion of those workers. Why? People will only tolerate a certain length of commute. One corporate executive described to me a process of looking for a new location for expansion. He drew a circle on a map around his current location because that was as far as the move could take the company. His key leaders didn’t want to move outside that circle because their best employees would leave if faced with intolerable commutes.
● Wasted time equals wasted money. When a salesperson or delivery person is sitting in traffic instead of spending time with customers or providing a service, businesses are adding to their overhead. The owner of a large distribution company in Atlanta estimated that his company, which tracks its delivery trucks using GPS devices, wastes as much as 100,000 “man hours” in traffic jams each year. Multiply those hours by what folks make per hour, and you see the impact.
So while most of us experience traffic frustrations on a very personal level, they have huge consequences for metro Atlanta’s economic vitality.
And whether we like it or not, we’re known as a place with traffic problems.
So while we argue about toll lanes and new interchanges, and while officials from one county want more rail lines and leaders from another county say they don’t, and while we ponder which governing body should be in charge of all this, the outside world’s business decision-makers are left to wonder what’s going on.
Outside metro Atlanta, people don’t know a T-SPLOST from a T-bone or a T-square. There’s no nuance when outsiders are looking in. What they do know is Atlanta’s traffic is bad and getting worse.
As one corporate relocation consultant put it: “It’s a serious issue. Something has to be done. Every company we deal with mentions it. It’s always an issue.”
Even the most casual study of Atlanta’s history shows this town’s ability to rise to the occasion in a crisis. Of course, there’s nothing like a good crisis to spring leaders into action and galvanize public opinion.
But there won’t be an obvious crisis this time, and we can’t fix this that way.
The challenge with our insidious transportation woes might be that the true crisis moment will come too late. After all, it takes years of planning to create a transportation system.
We’d better get started.
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