There are 2 truths I've found, having lived outside Chicago, Manhattan, Atlanta (in 3 different areas), Orlando, Tampa, and Los Angeles:

1. Wherever you are, people think the drivers there are worse than other places.

2. Wherever you are, people think the weather changes more frequently there than other places.

I have NEVER lived, and rarely visited places (including Europe), where someone hasn't used the "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour" joke, non-ironically.

As to your point I quoted, the drivers in Orlando are orders of magnitude worse than Atlanta. And I'm wondering if you've ever been to south Jersey or Boston, if you think Atlanta drivers are rude.

Your other points about McMansions and SUB-urban sprawl are spot on. And, everything IS 30 minutes away, and unreachable by mass transit.

re: casual racism... Dunno, maybe. At least it's not overt racism like I've seen in many other places, but I'm guessing that's not what you were getting at.

1. Wherever you are, people think the drivers there are worse than other places."

I have lived in an RV and traveled full-time for six of the past seven years. I've driven a bus-sized house through more cities than most folks have visited. I feel like I could write a (very boring) book about traffic. I agree that everyone complains about traffic, and everyone does say the same tired old line about the weather changing. But, there are differences in the character of drivers and traffic in various cities.

I will agree with you about Orlando (and Florida, in general); those are some shitty drivers, too. But, Atlanta really takes the cake. I was on the road for seven months in the RV before going to visit my folks for the first time (the first time in the RV, not the first time ever). I got cut off more, and had more people ignore my turn signals, in the hour it took me to drive across Atlanta than I had in the entire seven months prior in dozens of other cities, including Los Angeles (which has surprisingly polite drivers, given its reputation). I really don't get road ragey...except in Atlanta.

I have driven in both Boston and New Jersey. While they are crowded and the drivers (particularly cabs and buses) can be somewhat aggressive, and there are some ridiculous behaviors you wouldn't see in most other places (double-parking delivery trucks, honking and even yelling a lot more than you see in most places) I wouldn't categorize them in the same league of hatefulness as Atlanta drivers. Driving in Atlanta felt downright dangerous because of how aggressive drivers are.

We had done a 9 day trip across the US and Canada, through mud, ice, through a nasty storm, down mountains with hot brakes and transmission, but no part of that more stressful than the merges in Atlanta.

I also happen to live here, and what you say about aggression (I wouldn't call it hateful) is pretty accurate. Not only do people typically ignore signals, some will close gaps _because_ of your signal. As a result, way too many people (police included) never signal. It's lord of the flies.

I've driven in Manhattan before and it's not that bad. Nobody will let you in but nobody will actively try to prevent you from merging either. You have room or you don't, figure it out. Driving in south Jersey is like driving in a maze of cars who are actively trying to prevent you from changing lanes or getting where you want to go. Between the Crown Vic going 10 under the limit or the WRX going 110, it's a wonder anything lives past the first six months driving in the Cherry Hill area. Orlando was the same way but the places I was in it just wasn't crowded enough to be that much an issue.

They drive hard, but there's a very clear & consistent code/system everyone abides by, drivers are attentive and bewilderingly polite: signal, and—more often than not—someone immediately makes room for you. Makes for stress-free, predictable driving despite being 20 over at all times.

… or maybe that's the norm, but I'm from Seattle where drivers are timid, indecisive, unpredictable, and passive-aggressive.

That can't possibly have been a common occurrence in LA... Our weather changes about half a dozen times a year.

Seattle has a few months of near-uninterrupted sunshine and a few months of near-uninterrupted drizzle, but the intervening months interpolate by changing the weight of their random switches between the two.

Also, I don't know anyone in the South Bay (SF is different) who thinks the weather changes more frequently than other places. Here the joke is "Walk outside. It's sunny. It'll be sunny from April until November."

There have also been more shootings on the road in Houston than anywhere else I've lived. So, yeah, that seems scary, but it's not something I worried about when I lived there. In the instances where someone got shot that I know of, the person was kinda asking for it (they initiated violence and the person they were beating on happened to have a gun under the seat or in the glove box).

I've NEVER lived anywhere anyone has made that joke, ironically or otherwise. That may have to do with the fact that the last 2 places I've lived (Portland, OR and Phoenix, AZ) have very long stretches of monotonous weather. But 2 certainly doesn't seem nearly as true as 1.

I spent the first 24 years of my life in south Jersey and never perceived the drivers as particularly rude, especially compared to Boston ... can I ask where specifically?

I think there is a cultural bias at work here somewhat, too. Wherever you learned to drive seems normal, even if it is way different than other places.

I think this is why Orlando and Atlanta are perceived as the wild west of driving; very few people are FROM there. Everyone brings their driving norms from wherever they learned, and they don't often mix well.

That whole region, in general, has nicer people than their reputation would indicate, in my experience. New Yorkers and New Jerseyans (is that the right word?) were all pretty nice and helpful. I spent a month parked in Ridgewood, NJ (it was the closest I could park the RV to NYC for that long), and was struck by how friendly folks were across the whole area, given the reputation for rudeness. Riding the train was fun, asking for directions was rarely problematic, etc. Driving the house around sucked, but the people were fine.

When I was younger my friends and I would drive way more aggressively whenever we saw out of state plates. We thought it would be funny if they went home with horror stories.

Imho, Marietta/Cobb County (NW of Atlanta) and Alpharetta/North Fulton (N of Atlanta) especially tend to have... less than cosmopolitan perspectives. DeKalb (NE & E of Atlanta) can go various ways.

My rebuttal to Atlanta being casually racist is always "Have you lived in the NW/NE?" We're absolutely still racially stratified (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Atlanta ), but compared to the other places I've lived and visited you run into a wider variety of people in everyday life. Which is important to me.

Hell, when I was younger I once worked a service gig at a beach restaurant in CT and could count on two hands the number of non-white customers I served the entire summer.

I wouldn't choose to live "just outside" of Atlanta either, for all the terrible traffic/commute reasons you mentioned -- I live ITP and a 5 minute walk from a train station with a 10-minute hassle-free commute. Somehow I can survive here as part of a one-car household.

Also please don't paint an entire city (let alone one with Atlanta's demographics) as full of "casual racism." C'mon.

It's the only major city I've been to where a white person dropping the word "nigger" (and used in a clearly negative way) not only happens in conversation, but it doesn't elicit gasps or any negative response. To be fair, it's also among the more diverse major cities, with tons of black-owned businesses, and that's awesome. So, it may be the clash of cultures (shitty old poor white southerners surrounded by successful black folks leading to resentment) rather than Atlanta being more racist. But, the south, in general, has such a long history of segregation, red-lining, private clubs that mysteriously have no black members, neighborhoods with no black residents, etc.

So, I'm probably being overly harsh based on surface level stuff. Opportunity is an important part of the power of racism, and Atlanta seems to have shown itself capable of providing opportunity to black folks; at least enough to lead to lots of black folks choosing to live there. Cities like Austin, Portland, San Francisco, etc. may actually be more harmful (or at least less welcoming) to people of color than Atlanta, without any overt signals of racism.

Yeah, we've got problems, but I would actually point you to our BLM protests as an example of our racial tolerance. They were almost completely nonviolent, well-organized, and incredibly diverse. Atlanta has a "we're all in this together" kind of spirit, at least in my experience. Casual racism is, for the most part, not tolerated.

Maybe you should find new friends.

I was born in ATL and lived there the first 20 years of my life and then for 18 months after college. I can say unequivocally that I've never been in a situation where it would have been acceptable or "just felt normal" to encounter that.

As a counterexample, I have lived in Atlanta for the past 7 years and never once heard anything like this. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it feels like you're painting the city with an overly broad brush.

Look at St. Louis and Baltimore. Much more brutality on both sides and riots. Atlanta isn't the old Atlanta and we don't tolerate that crap.

I'm sure it's getting better over time; most places in the US are. But, it's only been a few years since I last saw someone behaving in an overtly racist manner in Atlanta. I can't imagine it's changed drastically in that time. I'd appreciate if you'd read everything I've written on racism in Atlanta in this thread (and the other child thread). I'm not trying to paint it as a black and white thing, or suggest that Atlanta is the only city that suffers from racism.

Grew up in the suburbs, hated it. Moved into Atlanta and fell in love. It's perfectly proportioned for cycling. The food everywhere is amazing (I still miss Atlanta's food, now that I'm in SF).

People need to stop judging others on how they want to live and pretend theirs is better.

Know why people move to the burbs? It's because most of the schools ITP are shitty, I can buy a bigger and newer house for my family to live comfortably. My small, 1974 home in Decatur is worth almost as much as my new home and the schools are not as good.

I work in Alpharetta, and probably will always work there so my commute is reasonable.

I have to fly into Atlanta from the West Coast 3-4 times a year and it is also my least favorite major American city.

There are nice places there (Top Golf, Bourbon Bar, tons of good restaurants)... But there are nice places everywhere and they certainly don't make up for Atlanta's other shortcomings. I can't articulate all the reasons for my distaste, but it just looks dirty and depressing. The traffic is horrible, the weather is usually bad. We refer to it as Shitlanta (which is an exaggeration, but not much of one).

clever. Come up with that all on your own?

And I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, which is fine as a response. It's a strong word, and I'm sure plenty of people love that area. We just emphatically do not.

Historically, most of the technology companies in the metro area were located in office parks in the northern suburbs. But momentum seems to be shifting back to in-town locations. When my firm moved to its present location in NW Midtown in 2007, we were the only tenant in our building. Since then, we've been joined by a marketing agency, Uber, Square, Worldpay, and a few others.