Atlantans Fear a Bumper-to-Bumper Crop of Visitors

When Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games in 1984, doomsayers predicted total traffic gridlock.

It didn’t happen.

“The traffic was so good it was unbelievable,” recalled Ed Rowe, who was assistant transportation director for Los Angeles’ traffic department 12 years ago. “It was like Sunday morning.”

Rowe is now a consultant for the Federal Highway Administration and has been helping Atlanta prepare for the 1996 Olympics. Once again there are dire predictions of catastrophe. Only this time Olympic organizers and traffic planners are among those making the predictions.

Despite the creation of a technologically advanced, federally financed $140-million traffic management system, officials acknowledge that Atlanta’s traffic is second only to the scorching Georgia heat in its potential to wreak havoc on the Centennial Olympic Games, which begin Friday.

And Sharon Wallace, spokeswoman for the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, said there is little chance of a Los Angeles-type miracle. The circumstances of the two cities are too radically different, she said.

“Even with the best of planning in the world, these are nearly unprecedented circumstances for Atlanta or any other city,” said Wallace. “It’s like you’re taking the more than 300,000 people who already live here and then you’re having from 2 to 4 million additional people coming through the city. There is only so much you can do to control these circumstances.”

Or, as one businessman told a local newspaper, 250 people are getting ready to cram into a house designed to hold only 25. “Something’s got to give,” he said.

Olympic organizers have engaged in an extensive program to educate the public about traffic conditions. Three-fourths of downtown businesses have agreed to shift their hours in order to get people to work by 7:30 a.m.

As for the others, officials say they should expect three-hour commutes from the suburbs.

In Los Angeles, while others predicted gridlock, Rowe said the official prediction was that everything would be fine as long as people altered their travel times and took alternative routes. “Nobody believed it,” he said.

He was surprised that the official line in Atlanta is so pessimistic. But he acknowledged a potential problem in that Atlanta’s arterial route system is incapable of absorbing nearly as much traffic as did Los Angeles’. “There is much less street capacity,” he said. And the Atlanta games are twice as large as the Los Angeles gathering, which the Soviets boycotted.

Officials expect 82,000 people to attend opening ceremonies Friday. From there, the crowds will grow, with 600,000 people expected to be packed into the three-mile area known as the Olympic Ring on the peak days of July 26-28. Thirteen sports venues are within the ring, along with the newly built park that will be the city’s central gathering place for the duration of the Games. One hundred thousand people are expected to visit the park daily.

On normal days, downtown’s employee population is 150,000.

“Whatever way you slice it there is going to be congestion,” said Wallace. “Traffic is going to be heavy the whole time. We just hope the public will cooperate with law enforcement officials.”

At a recent community meeting for people in Vine City, a neighborhood on the edge of downtown where several Olympic venues are located, angry residents were concerned about the effect of the Games on their lives and businesses.

“I normally leave home at 7 or something before 7 in the morning,” said one woman, seeking guidance.

“Let me suggest that you leave at 6 or something before 6 to get there,” responded police Capt. A.L. Williams.

“If it takes you 20 minutes to get from point A to point B, I would suggest you give yourself an extra 45 minutes,” he told another woman.

Churches and businesses in the neighborhood have threatened to sue the city and Olympic organizers unless a $3-million fund is set up to provide no-interest loans to help those that lose business because of the Games.

Wallace said organizers had few precedents on which to draw in drafting their traffic plan. “Los Angeles was different from other [Olympics] in that it was so spread out--people could park at the venues.”

While Los Angeles used existing facilities to host the Games, Barcelona, site of the 1992 Summer Olympics, underwent a massive reconstruction, including major infrastructure work, in order to accommodate the crowds, Wallace said. Atlanta falls somewhere between those two extremes.

Olympic organizers spent $500 million on venues that will be turned over to local government and universities after the Games. In addition, the city spent more than $30 million repairing downtown viaducts that will be major traffic corridors during the Games and $2 million upgrading traffic signals and improving intersections.

The upgrades were in conjunction with the federal government’s plans to unveil what Deputy Transportation Secretary Mortimer Downer touted as “the most comprehensive, most fully integrated intelligent transportation system in the world.”

The backbone of the $140-million system is 63 miles of fiber-optic cable planted underneath interstate highways and 125 miles of arterial routes. Surveillance cameras have been set up along highways that monitor speed, traffic volume and accidents, relaying the information to a command station that looks like Mission Control. It then is disseminated to travelers through a variety of means, including cable television, computers, electronic signs put along the freeways and more than 130 touch-screen kiosks around the city.

“There will be a lot of real-time information,” said Wallace.

The system also will be able to monitor buses. Dispatchers watching electronic maps at the transportation center will be able to tell if buses begin to bunch up or if one lags behind. They then may instruct the driver to speed up or slow down. They also will be able to see accidents or other problems and notify drivers to change routes.

The coordination among agencies is one of the transportation system’s greatest assets, said Rowe. “If you have to respond to something unexpected, something on the order of a major accident or terrorist attack, and you’re required to divert a lot of traffic, you’ll be able to coordinate between agencies.”

The system uses technologies that already are partially in place in other cities, including Los Angeles, but never before have all of the elements been integrated into a single system.

Barely a week before the start of the Games there seemed to be confusion about how emergency vehicles would cut through the traffic. William M. Rathburn, the former Los Angeles police official who is director of security for the Games, said that an emergency lane would be open even on streets that were being turned into pedestrian corridors for the Games.

But Wallace said it is unlikely that pedestrians and vehicles will be combined in such a way. Rather, she said, emergency vehicles will take special routes that will be off limits to pedestrians and other vehicles.

Rowe said the compactness of the Atlanta Games, plus the existence of a subway system, could be seen as an advantage. Since so many of the venues are close enough that people may walk from one to another, there will be less need for vehicles in the center of the city. People can park on the periphery, take buses or trains into downtown and then walk.

But officials worry in part because many visitors are expected to come to the city by car, affecting traffic conditions throughout the metropolitan area. “It’s a day trip for a lot of people,” said Wallace.

Moving Olympic spectators and participants through the city will be 1,750 buses that will operate in addition to the city’s normal mass transit system. Of these, 1,550 buses are on loan from other cities.

The large number of buses created another headache: hiring drivers. After organizers failed to find enough locally, they began recruiting out of town. The week before the start of the Games, 150 were still undergoing training to familiarize themselves with routes.