The following has been cross-posted on the r/fuckcars / Not Just Bikes / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car thread.
Road Guy Rob released his latest video,
The REAL Reason Atlanta's Suburbs Are So Congested (PreserveTube link is
here). I watched it because I like RGR enough to watch his videos. He starts out with an anecdote about how it takes a long time to get to the other side of two suburban properties (something that urbanists like to squeal about and would confirmation-bias their way into saying they're right) but goes into why Atlanta traffic is even worse than Houston's. Going into each section of his video:
1. I-85 and I-75 converge onto a single freeway through downtown (and I-20 also goes straight through downtown). I don't know how some of these cities combine Interstates like that, it's one reason why Knoxville traffic sucks (there it's I-75 and I-40) and there's no alternative major north-south roads either in the area.
2. The Perimeter Freeway was supposed to ring the city and provide a bypass option but the city kept growing and no additional loops were built (unlike Houston). It should be noted (RGR doesn't cover this) that Beltway 8 had some undeveloped or undeveloped areas for years, like the South Belt section just being two lanes in each direction with frontage roads and the northeast section lacking mainlanes entirely (they weren't built until the early 2010s). In San Antonio, their loop road is huge, but only recently I've believed have four laned all of it (and it's not a freeway in all the sections).
3. Their non-freeway roads are a bunch of twisty, disconnected roads that follow the topography, not following any logical pattern. Houston has a bad habit of creating road segments with the same name in hopes that they might connect later (and sometimes they do, 40+ years later) but Atlanta doesn't even have that (and these twisty roads are usually narrow). So their non-freeway major roads don't help take pressure off the freeways. He also blames Atlanta's subdivisions for being extremely disconnected. (Urbanists like to point at this example of building, but forget that they don't make these style of subdivisions anymore).
4. He does blame the larger lots of Atlanta houses, which are larger than average than most cities. Unfortunately, he didn't point out that you can't just cram more people on said lots without improving the infrastructure along with it.
5. The "Tollercoaster" is paid for by users and uses congestion pricing. (Despite the fact that even the original "induced demand" paper suggested that congestion pricing is the solution, urbanists don't like it. The only reason they like congestion pricing in NYC is that's being diverted to the MTA. If NYC's congestion pricing solely went to road maintenance and construction they wouldn't be gushing over it).
6. The guy that he's interviewing does make a good point--the only way not to have congestion is a severe depression. RGR points out that one of the things that does help congestion is optimization, like ramp metering. (This is something urbanists never even
consider because they don't actually research how freeways work).
7. And now we finally get to MARTA, comparing Mercedes-Benz Stadium (which has MARTA access) to the stadium for the Braves (referring to that name likely because it was built as SunTrust Park in 2017 but renamed a few years later after a merger on the corporate side). He points out that Cobb County and Gwinnett County voting to join MARTA won't do anything because it's hideously expensive to build new heavy rail lines (BART is $700M a mile, Hawaii is $1B).
8. Because most of the ATL area isn't very dense there's some project to get some of the smaller communities to densify with planning studies to see if they can do that, mostly by making the town centers self-sustaining and not tying them into Atlanta's core.
9. He talks about how the Buckhead area densified, only with "synergy from the train" and implying lack of minimum parking helped this process, but it ends abruptly with a noiseless jumble of images and him admitting he lost his drone in a condo tower.
The thing is that despite being nuanced in a lot of what urbanists would agree with, there's people in the comments section crying about it anyway. This is what a moderate looks like, and...I've said this before but RGR really needs to address this head on and get radicalized against urbanists, there's no use in appeasement and compromise.
