Photograph by Getty Images
Illustration by Graham Smith
I grew up in Collier Hills, a stone’s throw from Interstate 75 near the Northside Drive exit. My mother was terrified by the highway speeds and wouldn’t drive on it, even though she was the great-niece of Atlanta’s automotive pioneer, Alvin Belle Isle. Uncle Alvin took a rebuilt wreck and turned it into Atlanta’s first taxicab. That led to a fleet of cabs and an early automobile dealership. My father bought his first car from Belle Isle, a 1948 Plymouth.
I’ve always enjoyed driving and piloted two muscle cars when I was young: a Dodge Dart GTS and a Chevy Chevelle Malibu. As an adult, I wrote about traffic as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s first traffic columnist; from 1991 year to 1996 year, I wrote nearly 1,000 “Monroe Drive” columns.
Some people may blame me for Atlanta’s traffic catastrophe, but I tried to warn them. It’s sad: Last fall, I got stuck on I-85 and was an hour late for my 60th high-school reunion.
It’s bad now, but it’s been getting worse since the late 1950s, after the Supreme Court ordered the end of segregated schools. The suburbs boomed when White flight sent approximately 150,000 White residents out of the city from the late 1950s through the 1970s. That created a deluge of traffic on highways that couldn’t handle it.
The instinct of the Georgia Department of Transportation was to pour more concrete. More highways. More lanes: HOV lanes, reversible lanes, toll lanes.
The worst congestion is on the Downtown Connector—the convergence of two major Interstate highways, I-75 and I-85. It is swamped with a crush of more than 440,000 cars and trucks each day. Initial construction on the Connector began in 1948 and continued until 1964. Engineers designed it in a giant swoop to avoid downtown Atlanta, which wiped out Mechanicsville, Sweet Auburn, and other Black neighborhoods, displacing an estimated 24,000 people. And the congestion never let up: Over the years, the DOT expanded the Connector to 14 lanes wide.
With the exploding popularity of cars in the ’50s and ’60s, people stopped riding passenger trains. Car fever led to the destruction of Atlanta’s two downtown train stations, the Union and the Terminal, in the early 1970s. The late Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett called it “municipal vandalism.”
Trains could help the problem. A few years back, I argued that metro Atlanta’s biggest mistake was failing to extend MARTA into the suburbs. MARTA serves only Atlanta, Fulton County, DeKalb County, and Clayton County. It has limited service in Cobb. Several metro counties have their own bus systems.
There are other ideas: State and federal planners are talking about an expensive high-speed rail from Atlanta to Charlotte, but Georgia does not have funding for that yet. Years ago, there was talk of a “Brain Train” connecting UGA with Emory, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, and the historically Black colleges and universities. We’ll see.
I rarely go to Atlanta anymore, although I live in Athens, 60 miles away, because I can’t cope with the traffic, especially on I-285. Old people shouldn’t drive on the Perimeter Highway. They get lost and confused by all the lanes and exits. One oldster I wrote about was so bewildered that he ended up in Alabama. In 1982, Braves pitcher Pascual Pérez missed a start when he got confused and kept circling Atlanta on I-285.
The best solution for these lost souls on the Perimeter came from the Southern comedian Killer Beaz, who said, “They should put up a sign that says, ‘This is a big circle, dummy!’”
More on Atlanta transportation
Photograph by Osh Meister
“When I was growing up in Chamblee, MARTA was new, and we would often drive down to the Avondale station and ride into downtown for Hawks or Flames games. I saw people who were different from me, parts of the city I wouldn’t have seen otherwise; that was pretty formative for me. Coming out of the civil rights movement, Atlanta was in a remarkable place. There were people willing to make hard, expensive choices to lay the groundwork for Atlanta’s future. Since the Olympics, we’ve been coasting. Maybe the Beltline is an exception, but we’ve only built the easy parts. The hard parts—especially transit, which lays that kind of groundwork—we haven’t built yet. The city’s growth in the last 20 years is only the beginning; much more change is coming. I hope we can reignite the civic interest that came out of the civil rights era: people willing to do the hard work of preparing the city for the future that’s coming.” – Atlanta Beltline creator Ryan Gravel
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This article appears in our May 2026 issue.
