By Brandon Case
Pratt Columnist
Special to the Tribune

Everybody has a least favorite place to drive in, where the traffic is horrendous, scary, stressful, and seemingly never-ends.

I haven’t driven everywhere—and there are certainly much worse places—but Atlanta, Georgia is one of my least favorite places to either drive through or be a passenger within a car (in Europe, Prague, Czechia is another place least favorite place to drive in, but at least there is a good transit system you can use there).

In fact, I won’t drive through Atlanta. That’s my wife’s job (and I do my best to keep my mouth shut; it isn’t easy).

The reason that Atlanta may be such a mess to drive in is because Atlanta’s has just under 500,000 citizens, while the metropolitan area’s population is almost 7 million. So, everybody is going somewhere else. In any case, Atlanta bound traffic begins thickening up 30 miles before you arrive there. Once all of the semi-trucks take the I-85 bypass (which is mandatory for the big rigs and which loops the city), traffic from Atlanta starts pouring in, so it really doesn’t get any better. In a short, time, you can go from sudden slowdown to grinding halt to everyone trying to win the NASCAR freeway race.

If you search online for “bypassing Atlanta,” you will find website after website that offers an opinion of the best way to do this. The common consensus is that Atlanta’s traffic is not for the fainthearted.

When driving through Atlanta, you cross your fingers, and, if it were possible, would hold your breath for the entire span across, hoping that one NASCAR-crazed motorist, distracted driver, or frustrated trucker merging back onto I-22 doesn’t plow into someone else and back up traffic all the way to Augusta or Birmingham.

Atlanta is a truly white-knuckle experience for someone from rural America. I always give a prayer of thanks each time I make it through alive. There is only one time that we drove through Atlanta that it wasn’t

so bad: Easter Sunday morning while everyone was in church. Tribune columnist and OTR trucker Ron Moore has a simple solution for surviving Atlanta traffic: drive through at 2 am. The only problem, he said, is that “people are still nuts at that time in the morning.”