Bracknell on Steroids

In an earlier post, I described Atlanta as "Bracknell on Steroids".

Bracknell is a soulless 1960s new town 25 miles west of London, seemingly built around cars rather than people. As a major centre for IT companies it was the subject of a lot of negative comments in the satirical BackBytes column in Computing.

When I first visited Atlanta, it reminded me of a gigantic version of Bracknell, covering an area the size of Greater London. This Atlanta Journal-Constitution article confirms this; it appears that Atlanta is the 4th most sprawling city in the whole of the US.

I hate sprawls! The one big reason I turned down my ex-employer's offer to relocate to Atlanta was the fact that it's simply impossible to survive there without a car. The city lacks the sort of comprehensive public transport networks we have in any British city of similar size. Worse still, the physical layout of the city would make any decent mass transit system prohibitively expensive to construct. Yes, they do have the MARTA network, but it covers only a tiny fraction of the city; and it went nowhere near my ex-employer's offices. I found most of the bus services in the suburbs are less frequent that the services in rural Cornwall!

Of course one reason American cities sprawl the way they do is that they simply have the space. But how much is due to leaving everything to 'the market'? On the other hand, who built all those roads that encourage the sprawl?