The combination of a poor infrastructure and lousy coordination is primarily responsible for the woes Atlanta residents are currently enduring.
This could provide an opportunity for Atlanta to make significant changes that would not just prevent incidents like this from recurring but to actually improve as a city (its traffic is notoriously awful even when there’s not a cloud in the sky). However, we will probably see people scrambling into defense mode with more alacrity than it handled this week’s storm.
serhasacomplaint 
observeratlarge
January 30, 2014 at 9:57 pm
There’s been a lot made of a few people in the northeast poking a little fun at Atlanta. Well, it’s not really their fault — we have been suffering truly miserable weather, and we’ve been handling it well — as a people and a region. But we aren’t really happy that Atlantans had to spend hours and hours in their cars and school kids had to sleep in their classrooms. Although, in Indiana we got snowed in at the sectional basketball tournament in March more than once, and it didn’t kill us (truth to be told, we had a ball).
I think the thing that perplexed us was the sign of hundreds of cars headed in one direction on a multi-lane highway, and lanes the opposite direction totally empty! If I was in that traffic next to an empty highway, you can bet I would have found a way to get on the other side and go somewhere warm and dry, not in a car. Or as you said, lousy coordination! What were “they” — and by they I mean public officials, emergency management personnel, traffic police — thinking? Why weren’t they communicating with drivers — everyone’s got facebook and twitter now — and telling them how to avoid this?
Somebody’s got some ‘splainin to do, for real. If this happened in New York, you’d be able to hear the screaming all the way to Seattle!