What surprises me is that Dallas hasn't had this problem. We're sprawling farther away from the center than ever, and long commutes downtown aren't really a problem because businesses are choosing to locate themselves in the suburbs. This was recently underscored by a number of large businesses, Toyota being the most well-known, relocating themselves to the Dallas area and planting their headquarters in Plano and Frisco. In fact, we've hit the point where it's not uncommon for people in or right next to the city proper commuting to suburbs farther out than where they live.

Why hasn't Atlanta embraced the concept of edge cities [0] as Dallas has?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city

Atlanta has these. They're roughly where the development stops. Winder (where I live), Gainesville, etc. It's probably an environment thing. Past the edge, it's all trees, hills, farms, and mansions. That makes it hard to get the big, cheap, contiguous spaces developers like.

Caterpillar did open a plant outside the edge, but it's also close to Athens with its airport and relative proximity to both a port and a major city.

Looking up Winder on a map makes the problem a little more clear: the layout of roads there is awful. There's no nearby freeways, and the major roads look like spaghetti.

The Dallas area did a very good job of organizing outward sprawl into rings like a sequoia. There are edge cities, sometimes more than one, within each ring (Far North Dallas & Richardson, Plano, Frisco & McKinney, Prosper...). Freeways delineate the rings (380 isn't a freeway yet, but plans are in the works), six-lane arterial roads are laid out in a nice, neat grid even extending into the exurbs' exurbs, and subdivisions are packed closely together to get more use out of the same space (I honestly can't stand how suburbs in eastern states look rural to my eyes... I grew up in a suburb filled with single-family homes with yards, and we still don't waste space like eastern states do).

For example, compare the northern sprawl of Dallas https://goo.gl/maps/qhK6geVaYKz with the northeastern sprawl in Atlanta: https://goo.gl/maps/PZsPw6YUyD92