You down with OTP?

A couple of weeks ago I did something that I, a proud Dekalb County resident, have never allowed myself to do. I went to realtor.com and started looking at houses for sale OTP.

This term, OTP, needs no explanation for my fellow Atlantans. For some of you, it’s home. For others, it’s a disease.  

For the rest of you: OTP is the acronym we use to describe the suburbs. “Outside The Perimeter.” Atlanta is surrounded by a perimeter highway, 285. Decatur, where I live, is also encircled by 285.  Anything outside of that highway is considered OTP. 

I’ve always been anti-OTP. I’d make the typical worn out jokes about needing one’s passport to make a trip out there.  It baffled me how or why anyone could live in “the ‘burbs.” It’s so far!  The traffic! What do you do on a Friday night? Go to TGIFridays??

After 5 minutes on the internet, I got it. You can get a lot of house for almost nothing. I discovered I could trade in my current house, move 15 miles and get twice the house for half the price. AND be in a better school district.

All I could think was, why the hell did I buy this crummy old dump when I could live in a brand-spanking-new palace just a few miles down the road?!

After I started researching some of the towns OTP, I started to hate on my neighborhood big time. Downtown Decatur has cool restaurants and shops and has great schools. I live in Decatur, but not downtown Decatur, and I’m outside of the Decatur High School district.  The schools where we live are not as good.  In my eyes, I had the worst of both worlds: I was in a lame suburban neighborhood but with crummy schools and in-town prices!

When we bought our house, I didn’t care about school systems, and all I wanted was to be close to Emory, and I wanted to be able to take a cheap cab home when I went to the bars and drank too much. Now, I don’t work at Emory anymore and I don’t go out drinking. The last drunken cab ride I took was when Tess was just a glimmer in Andy’s eye! My priorities have changed. I want good schools, a small mortgage and a home office.

I had a lot of in-town people tell me how foolish I was to think about going OTP. And it wasn’t just the commute I was warned about. “It’s a different world out there,” they’d say. The further away you travel OTP the “red-er” the politics go. And to be horribly frank, a lot of people in-town view those who live OTP as a bunch of racist, homophobic assholes who spend their weekends at gun shows. (No offense to my OTP peeps, but you must know this is the stereotype!)

           

As much as I was aware of this stereotype, I was hesitant to believe it was accurate. Andy grew up on the edge of a major city, and I grew up in a rural cow town, and we aren’t racist, homophobic assholes.

And, let’s be honest people, we might be in-town… but it’s still fucking Georgia! Of course I like the idea of living and working in a community of people who share my values, but if I really wanted to surround myself with people who share my politics, I’d move back to Northampton, Massachusetts. Or better yet, PTown.

So one Saturday we decided to take a drive out to Gwinnett County.  All I could think on that drive was: damn, this shit is FAR!  Really, it didn’t look so bad on a map – but it takes a long time to drive out there. We were focusing on the towns that were the shortest commute to Emory and it was still far as hell. And it was a weekend.

I didn’t like the idea of Andy having such a long commute and I also didn’t like the idea of feeling so isolated out there. Sure, I want a bigger house, I want another kid, maybe even 2, I want guest rooms for my family. I hate having an old house that constantly needs updating. I hate my huge mortgage most of all. But I just didn’t feel good about being so far away.

Then something else happened. You may have heard.

It snowed. 2 inches. And Atlanta was brought to its knees.

The Daily Show
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Jon Stewart had some fun at our expense... 

and, as usual, makes some good points along the way.

Andy and I had been following the forecast and knew we were going to have some sort of frozen-ish precipitation Tuesday afternoon. Andy left Emory as the first flurries were falling. That afternoon, I started seeing some of my friends post on Facebook about the horrible traffic. By 2pm, I checked google maps on my phone and saw this:

I was glued to the local news, watching the stories of people trapped in their cars. It was taking people hours just to pull out of their parking decks on Peachtree Street. People started abandoning their cars along the highway and heading out on foot. Home Depots were opening as shelters. A friend of mine’s husband walked home 13 miles in the snow while CARRYING A GALLON OF MILK for their 2 year old because they were out.

Of course, the hardy New Englanders kept asking what is wrong with these southerners who can’t drive in the snow. The problem was not the driving in the snow, however. (Well, I mean… it was – let’s be honest, even rain causes horrible Atlanta traffic, but the weather was only the beginning).

Around noon, when the snow started to fall, everyone in Atlanta left work at exactly the same time. Five-million people found themselves on the road all at once. Even if there was no snow and it was a beautiful day out, there would have been a massive traffic jam from that many people being on the roads all at once.

Millions of people on the road and the snow got worse and then it froze. Fender benders happened. Nearly 1,000 of them apparently. That obviously exacerbated the traffic. And because of the traffic, the sanders couldn’t get back out to treat the roads. That obviously exacerbated the slippery-ness factor. It was a vicious cycle.

People were literally trapped. Even those who wanted to give up on driving, abandon their cars and walk, couldn’t even pull their cars over to the shoulder to do so.  People who couldn’t get out of town slept on the floor at Publix and CVS. A baby was born on 285 because Mom and Dad were stuck in their car in traffic. Children were stuck at school – and worse – on school buses all night. Can you imagine knowing your child was trapped on a school bus all night???

People on Facebook and Twitter, the media, everyone keeps asking, why did this happen? How did this happen?  Who is to blame?!

Even Al Roker blasted Nathan Deal (our governor) and Kasim Reed (Atlanta’s mayor) on the Today Show for failing to act. And, yes, I agree - school should have been cancelled; roads should have been pre-treated with salt and sand (and before 9am the day the weather rolled in). Different choices should have been made.

But what happened on Tuesday wasn’t just because of slippery roads. Let’s get real here for a minute and admit that what happened on Tuesday was a result of suburban sprawl.

Hundreds of thousands of people were tempted by the same things I was: big, cheap houses in excellent school districts 30 miles from work.  People have kids in school in Alpharetta, Marietta, Johns Creek and Lawrenceville but work in Buckhead. Downtown or Emory and the CDC.

When they are told to come get their kids at 1pm, they have to drive 20 miles or more to get there. They don’t take the train because MARTA sucks and doesn’t go anywhere near where they need it to. And when millions of people all get in their cars and hit the road at the same time, a big ass traffic jam happens.

While 2,000 kids around Atlanta were stuck at school or on school buses during and after the storm, apparently Dekalb County, my county, didn’t have any. I’m guessing that was because the kids who go to Dekalb County schools have parents who work close-by and were able to go get them.

I was super lucky on Tuesday. Andy was able to leave work early, before shit got real out there. And because I am working from home and Tess doesn’t go to daycare or school, we were all safely in the warm before a single flurry even stuck to the grass. If Andy had to stay at work longer, and the traffic or road conditions were too crazy to drive, he could have easily walked the 2.5 miles home. When your kid is in school 30 miles from where you work or where you are stuck in traffic, you can’t walk to them. 

Again, yes, I agree – errors were made. Our government officials failed to act, but it wasn’t just the failure to cancel school or put salt on I-75 that caused this mess.

It was the decades of poor civic planning to cope with the suburban sprawl. It’s the fact that people who want good schools and affordable housing are forced to go to Gwinnett or Cobb County. I am not an expert on the public school system, but what I do know is that the Atlanta Public Schools have been plagued with a cheating scandal, the accreditation of Dekalb County schools has only just been removed from “probation” status, and Clayton County schools lost their accreditation in 2008 (it’s since been regained, but they were only the 3^rd school district in the US to lose accreditation since 1969!) Clearly, we need better options around here. I don’t pretend to know how to improve things, but I’m sure fewer people would commute out to Gwinnett County if the schools in town were as good as they are out there.

And, I think the biggest contributing factor to this whole mess was the lack of a decent public transit system. Sure, we have MARTA, but the suburbs aren’t accessible by MARTA. In fact, most of Atlanta and Decatur aren’t accessible by MARTA. I live inside the perimeter and it’s almost 4 miles to the closest MARTA station.

Emory employs over 24,000 people and has almost 15,000 students. I don’t know how many more work at the CDC, right next door. They are both well inside the perimeter in the city of Atlanta, and the closest train is 2.5 miles away. There are buses and shuttles, but no train access to campus. To think of how many cars could be taken off the road if only people could take a train to Emory or the CDC.

Atlanta isn’t the only city where people commute from suburban towns many miles away. I know plenty of people who live 20 or more miles from where they work in Boston. Hell, people commute to Boston from Worcester! But the difference is, there is a great system called the T that can get people out of Boston. We don’t have that in Atlanta. For many people, for most people, the only way out of this city is by car.

           

I will try to be hopeful and say perhaps this catastrophe will make the city and state re-think their commitment to public transportation. I don’t mean the politicians. I mean the people of this city. Both republican and democratic politicians came together in 2012 to support a referendum to invest in public transit improvements via a small tax increase, but the voters overwhelmingly voted against it.

The same people who want to blame Nathan Deal and Kasim Reed because they got stuck in traffic are the same people who voted against a small tax increase that would have made it easier for them to get home. Cries for smaller government suddenly turned into “Where were you when I needed you?” Meanwhile, if the City of Atlanta or Fulton or Dekalb County had spent millions of dollars on hundreds of sanders and snow plows, and paid workers to go out to spread salt all over for days prior to the storm, there would have been accusations of government waste. I’m certainly not one to defend Nathan Deal, but we just can’t have it both ways.

Of course, if the next catastrophe is one during which we need to evacuate the city rather than just get home, I am totally f'd along with the rest of you. 

This post got far more political than I wanted, and I hope no one thinks I'm judging anyone who lives OTP! Trust me, I get it... the pull is strong! I was practically packing my bags 2 weeks ago! In the end, however, this “snow storm” made me incredibly grateful for my small, moldy old 1950’s ranch with no closet space and it’s endless “To Do” list. Because, instead of spending 16 hours stranded on an interstate or sleeping at a Home Depot on Tuesday, Andy and I were doing this: