Talk:Metro Atlanta

Regions & cities

I'm not sure whether we want articles for all of the existing five subregions (counties), but I don't know the area well enough to be a good judge of how to do this. I listed all cities for which we have articles falling within the region on this page, mostly just to keep things organized while this is sorted out. But if we do decide that we want the subregion articles, this list should be reduced to the traditional maximum of nine. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 17:43, 18 November 2009 (EST)

Counties are not regions

Seriously, have you seen the shape of Fulton county? There's no way that's a useful division for travelers. --(WT-en) BigPeteB 14:27, 8 April 2011 (EDT)

See Project:Geographical hierarchy#Dividing geographical units. In general use of counties as regions is not encouraged unless they make sense for travel; they are also helpful to locals who are trying to figure out where to put content in Wikivoyage. As an example, for California the regions aren't counties, but where it made sense we tried to align region borders with county borders as a way of making it clearer what the region boundaries are. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 14:35, 8 April 2011 (EDT)

So... you agree?

I'm realizing as I look at all of the sub-pages that this is really a mess. It's been almost entirely divided by political divisions (counties and cities) which is not even intuitive to me as a local... it would be a complete mess for a traveler trying to use this as a guide.

I'd really like to see the whole thing reorganized from the top down, but I'm not sure how to go about this, given the amount of existing content (not to mention that it appears a single user has made Decatur (20,000 people) into a slightly longer article than Atlanta (420,000 people)) but I think it needs to get done. Atlanta's political divisions are a mess compared to most metros of this size, and using them to subdivide articles here makes no sense. --(WT-en) BigPeteB 15:03, 8 April 2011 (EDT)

Propose a breakdown, ideally with a map (it doesn't have to be a good one), and then if there is a consensus for change solicit help in reorganizing things. See Talk:Washington (state)#Geographical hierarchy for a similar discussion. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 15:17, 8 April 2011 (EDT)

Proposed new breakdown for "Atlanta" limits

[[Image:Proposed_Atlanta_boundary.png|thumb|250px|New proposed boundary for [[Atlanta]] (very rough sketch)]]

I'd like to see Atlanta and its surrounding communities restructured some. The subdivisions of Metro Atlanta are just counties, and are unintuitive even to me having lived here for 10 years. It also looks like Atlanta is mostly defined using the city limits, which is really unhelpful. I propose changing the definition of what goes under Atlanta to be closely (but not exactly) aligned with MARTA and ITP, so that small towns like Decatur and Chamblee get put in proper context as one part of a sprawling metro area.

My concept for "Atlanta" is that it should roughly be areas served by MARTA. This is broadly similar to ITP, but it excludes the whole I-75 corridor north of Howell Mill Rd. It includes a decent chunk of Sandy Springs and Doraville, even though they're partially OTP. It also includes all of Dekalb County ITP—I don't see a compelling reason why it was left out in the first place.

Since travelers will inevitable use the highways to visit areas outside of Atlanta (whatever that ends up being) I propose using them to divide Metro Atlanta into manageable areas:

• I-75 North: Smyrna, Marietta, and Kennesaw
• GA-400: Roswell, Alpharetta, Cumming
• I-85 North: Norcross, Duluth, Lawrenceville... there are a lot to choose from here
• I-20 East: Stone Mountain, Snellville
• I-75 South: Stockbridge
• I-85 South: Fayetteville, Peachtree City
• I-20 West: Powder Springs, Douglasville, maybe Six Flags if it gets its own article

Conveniently, the highways all go in cardinal directions, which is easy for visitors to keep straight.

I don't want to act unilaterally, and I welcome debate. I'd love to see some feedback, for or against. But let's work on getting Atlanta organized in a way that's useful for travelers, instead of politicians. --(WT-en) BigPeteB 13:26, 8 May 2011 (EDT)

Well, it's been a week, and no one has given any comments. I'm going to explain in a little more detail why I think this is a good plan, in hopes of soliciting some comments. (And then if no one replies still... well, we'll see what happens first.)

Atlanta has a long history of not merging with surrounding communities. In fact many of the small communities outside the city limits have themselves not incorporated until very recently (Sandy Springs and Johns Creek just incorporated within the last few years.) Between that and the obvious gerrymandering, the legal borders of Atlanta and Fulton county, and the surrounding areas, are totally meaningless to visitors. In keeping with Wikivoyage's policy, we shouldn't be relying on them to define the limits of Atlanta.

Atlanta is also mostly a driving city. For the foreseeable future, public transit is only useful for visiting a handful of areas; and even between MARTA-accessible places, it would be faster (and probably cheaper) to drive. The connecting bus services (CCT, GCT, etc) are even worse; I wouldn't even mention them to travelers because they're a massive waste of time compared to just renting a car.

That leaves the problem of where to draw the limits of Atlanta, and then how to divide up Metro Atlanta. As an easy measure, I've suggested roughly following MARTA because it nicely separates MARTA-accessible destinations from ones where having a car is a necessity. It's easy to comprehend and to decide whether something belongs under Atlanta or Metro Atlanta. And (at present) it's very similar to ITP/OTP, which is how locals tend to think of Atlanta versus the rest of the metro area.

This involves some major reorganization, but consider:

• All three of the major Atlanta airports (Hartsfield-Jackson, Dekalb-Peachtree, and Fulton County) end up under Atlanta. Seeing as PDK and FTY are the second- and third-busiest airports in all of Georgia, it seems silly to exclude them because they're not within the official city limits.

• Destinations served by MARTA, like Decatur, Chamblee, Doraville, and Sandy Springs, end up under Atlanta which is where MARTA is described. This fixes the hierarchy problem that currently exists with them.

There are some points for debate. I personally think that some or all of Sandy Springs and Doraville should be included under Atlanta, because although they're on the border (or just outside) of I-285, they're both directly served by MARTA stations. On the other hand, I would leave out North Springs Station, since it's almost exclusively used by commuters and there's not much to visit near it.

To the northwest, you quickly run into Cobb County, which is very difficult to access from MARTA. The nearest place of interest is Vinings (which is off the highway and pretty much requires a car to access) and then Smyrna, which is definitely OTP. So I would cut it off early near Howell Mill Rd, and let the whole I-75N corridor be covered under the Northwest sub-region.

On the west side, MARTA rail doesn't quite run to Fulton County Airport, but it's easy to connect by bus, and it makes a lot more sense than putting FTY under Metro Atlanta/West or some other nonsense place that hides its connection to Atlanta. Six Flags, on the other hand, is more of a Get Out destination since you'd be spending all day there, so leaving that out from Atlanta seems to make sense.

On the east side, I'm strongly in favor of including Dekalb county, which is the only other county that did agree to participate in MARTA from the beginning. 285 is a convenient border, since you really need a car to go out any further (say to Stone Mountain).

To the south, I don't see a point in towns like Hapeville, East Point, and College Park having their own articles; there's barely enough to write about. It would be much better to cover them more generally under Atlanta/South.

--(WT-en) BigPeteB 12:46, 15 May 2011 (EDT)

I think the lack of response has mostly been due to lack of contributors with knowledge of the area. Knowing almost nothing about Atlanta I can personally only offer suggestions based on efforts to define boundaries for other cities in regions, and the biggest one is just to make sure that the borders are very clearly defined, particularly if your proposal is to use something other than recognized city borders. Contributors to Wikivoyage need to understand how a region is organized, and locals generally assume that official government borders are being used unless there is a map or other delineation that they can easily follow.

As a result, it is often good to use official borders as much as possible and to deviate only where there is a clear benefit to doing so. You've made some good arguments above, but for cases of individual towns, even if they are small, it is definitely worth strongly considering whether they really won't ever deserve an article before subsuming them into another city article.

With that said, the current article apparently has issues, so barring further comment your best bet may just be to plunge forward and start making what you feel are some of the more obvious cleanups and see how things go. -- (WT-en) Ryan • (talk) • 13:09, 15 May 2011 (EDT)

@Bigpeteb: I would very much like to help fix the districts and content on the Atlanta. What the would be the best first step for a group discussion? Tdempsey (talk) 19:13, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Scrap the empty county articles

In agreement with the general opinions above that counties are no way to organize the communities of the Atlanta area, and given that all the existing county articles are essentially empty and in any case are not a part of the IsPartOf hierarchy, I propose doing away with them entirely by redirecting them to this Metro Atlanta article, where we put a simple in-article grouping in the Cities section. I am not very familiar with the Atlanta area, but looking at the map, it occurs to me that we could just use something like this: (please comment below the breakdown)

---

West and Northwest

Cities along the I-20, I-75, and US-278 corridors.

• Austell
• Lithia Springs
• Kennesaw (NE)
• Marietta (NW)

North

North of the I-285 loop.

• Alpharetta
• Roswell
• Sandy Springs

Northeast

Along the I-85 and US-29 corridors.

• Buford (NE)
• Duluth (NE)
• Lawrenceville (NE)
• Lilburn (NE)

East

Along the US-78 corridor.

• Loganville
• Snellville
• Stone Mountain

South

Along and between the I-75 and I-85 corridors.

• Fayetteville
• Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport

---

So, is this suggestion not better than the current mess we have, and/or does anyone have suggestions? Alternately, we could just dump all 16 cities in the list and call it done, but the above organizational outline makes sense to me. What do we say? Texugo (talk) 22:53, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

Athens is Atlanta?

So if I visit Athens I visit Atlanta? This must be the most ridiculous wannabe "Metropolitan Area" ever... Atlanta proper is not even close to being the biggest city in the south. Even Charlotte is almost twice as big. —The preceding comment was added by 80.217.103.193 (talk • contribs)

What does the size of the central city have to do with anything? If what you're saying, though, is that some of the text in this article is inaccurate, such as the following —

'The Metro Atlanta area has 28 large Counties spreading from the Georgia-Alabama Border, east to Athens, south to about Macon, and north to Jasper. It is over about 8,376 square miles and holds over 5,475,213 people, making it the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States.' —

In precisely what way is it inaccurate? Ikan Kekek (talk) 19:36, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

Rewrite

This page needs a rewrite. It has TOO MANY opinions and few facts. Tdempsey (talk) 22:00, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Tdempsey: It sounds like you're just the person to give this article the re-write and update it needs. Please plunge forward! Ground Zero (talk) 22:07, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

@Ground Zero Thank you. And plunge forward is very informative.