It hasn’t been long since I-85 collapsed and it’s continuing to take its toll on Atlanta traffic. Locals will be forced to deal with it until it’s fixed months down the line. It’s hard to say when exactly the highway will be done, but for now we all have to power through and deal with it.
In the meantime, however, it may help to look at the bright side in all of this. Granted, there isn’t a whole lot of brightness to find…but there is some. Hopefully, it will be just enough to keep your spirits up until crews are finishing repairing the bridge this summer.
Exploring New Roads
I-85 was, no doubt, one of the busiest paths for transportation and now that it’s out of the picture for a while, new roads become new options. It may seem like a local road off the highway would take longer, but they can surprise you. Your morning commute could expose you to a quicker and less congested route that you never would have found before, and you could finally be free from gridlock traffic.
MARTA Will Benefit
This is some pretty good news for everyone in Atlanta. We all have a reason to hope that MARTA’s ridership will see some major improvements. If you’re the one behind the wheel, more people on MARTA means less people on the road. Less people on the road means less traffic. If you are already a MARTA rider, seeing increased ridership means funding for mass transit could also see a major boost. That money would then hopefully be used to improve MARTA overall. Whether its new safety features or even some cosmetic makeovers, getting more funding for MARTA is simply a good move for Atlanta.
Atlanta Shaping Up Transportation
The bridge fire/collapse is about as bad as things can get for a city like Atlanta. Students are commuting and people are trying to get to their jobs. Having a major highway down brings up a lot of speculation as to why this happened. Why were these flammable substances under the interstate in the first place? What will the city do to fix this for the future? It’s questions like this that surface and really put the quality of transportation in Atlanta to question. Ensuring that these structures are stable and capable of sustaining damage should be a top priority and not an oversight by any means. After this fiasco, there’s no doubt that the publicity coming from this accident will drive the city to do better for its people. Atlanta can’t afford another blow like this.
Feature Image Source: Curbed Atlanta
