Flutterby™! : Atlanta & snow storms as a symptom of doing it wrong

Apparently Atlanta got two inches of snow yesterday, and the combination of the forecast and various public and private entities not shutting down early enough meant that kids slept at schools and people were stuck on highways overnight.

Of course this is getting various prognosticators going about failures. Larry said:

With all the traffic nightmares I keep wondering if Gov. Deal did something to piss off Chris Christie.

Which I giggled at, but as we dig deeper we run into things like: Mother Jones: How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta also published at The Atlantic: How 2 Inches of Snow Created a Traffic Nightmare in Atlanta:

Metro areas of 6 million people need to be prepared for anything.

Let's just get this out of the way right fast: The author of that piece is a moron. Complaining that people are driving at a reasonable speed for conditions is the worst sort of idiocy. But there's a deeper thing here, because the arrogance on display in this piece is getting a lot of linkage:

The real problem is that kids were in neighborhoods that were so sparse that they couldn't walk home. That we've come to accept 20+ mile commutes as normal.

You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that's so fragile, that's so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we're seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it).

This isn't solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.

And we start doing that by not building huge Interstate rings around cities, and by not encouraging suburban sprawl.