ATLANTA — Metro Atlanta drivers lost 87 hours to traffic in 2025, according to a report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, marking the worst year since the annual study began.
The annual study tracks congestion across American cities going back years, but the source of Atlanta’s gridlock goes back even further.
Channel 2 Action News’s Mike Shields and Channel 2 Investigates traced back decades of growth and city planning to uncover the history behind how Atlanta’s traffic became so bad.
“Atlanta always has had traffic problems inside the city,” said Paul Crater, a historian at the Atlanta History Center. “These roads that emanate from the railroads were built for mules and wagons, and so they really weren’t built for automobiles.”
In its earliest days, Atlanta had a different name: Terminus. The name referred to the point where Western & Atlantic Railroad reached its southernmost point. The growing rail town saw early growth as rail lines converged from four different directions.
“Atlanta was built as a railroad town,” Crater said. “You’ve got these curvy rail lines. Streets are going this way, and that way and this way.”
The paths converged in modern downtown Atlanta near the Gulch and Five Points. The crisscrossing paths resulted in a grid that was already twisting as it wrapped around rail lines. As the city became more established, more traditional square grids formed around the twisted core, creating bends.
Those bends were never straightened. By the time some of Atlanta’s earliest cars were being registered in 1904, the roads built for mules and wagons had given way to a trolley system. As more drivers hit the roads, the trolley system gave way to a growing congestion problem.
Early highways brought more growth, and with it, more drivers.
Then, World War II brought a highway craze across the country.
“It was inspired by the German Autobahn, “Post-World War II and even before World War II ended, there were plans to build interstates to connect different cities, not necessarily to connect people within a city, but to connect the whole country.”
The war also transformed Atlanta’s economy, transitioning it into a major industrial manufacturing and shipping hub and putting even more cars on the road.
In 1944, while the war was still in progress, Atlanta and state leaders wanted to find new ways to keep the city moving as congestion grew. They commissioned the Lochner Report to design and plan the city’s highway system. In 1947, the report provided the blueprint for Atlanta’s highway system, creating the Downtown Connector.
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The plan ran the new routes through the heart of historic Black neighborhoods, displacing thousands of residents.
“What they did was cut through neighborhoods in Atlanta,” Crater said. “A pattern that you see throughout the United States with the development of highways is that they’re bisecting traditional African American communities, causing a lot of dislocation.”
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, Atlanta’s highways and expressways expanded dramatically as they formed the city’s modern highways.
Interstate 75 and Interstate 85 created and connected the city’s suburbs as they stretched across Georgia to connect the state to the rest of the Southeast.
More interstates followed. Interstate 20 and the Interstate 285 perimeter cemented the modern layout of Atlanta’s neighborhoods, suburbs and major roadways, creating the barrier between inside and outside the perimeter.
“People are moving farther and farther out, and interstates are connecting them, and they’re all driving,” Crater said.
In the years since, the congestion has only grown. According to the 2025 Texas A&M Urban Mobility Report, the 22 hours drivers spent stuck behind the wheel when data collection began in 1982 have ballooned to 87 hours in 2025.
Through the decades, delays have grown consistently. The only large dip came briefly during the COVID-19 pandemic — before Atlanta’s traffic came roaring back and left the metro with some of its worst gridlock on record.
Over a century since traffic first hit the city, and the traffic problems have only grown; throughout the city’s history, bigger roads, more people and longer drives continue to leave commuters and community leaders with no easy solution in sight.
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