Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta is the capital and largest city of Georgia, with roughly 500,000 residents in the city proper and more than six million across the Atlanta Metropolitan Area. It is the economic centre of the South, and the scale of what moves through it every day shapes everything about how people get hurt here.

The road network comes first. Interstate 75 and Interstate 85 merge through the middle of the city to form the Downtown Connector, one of the heaviest-travelled stretches of interstate anywhere in the country. Interstate 20 crosses east to west. Interstate 285 rings the city as the Perimeter, and Georgia State Route 400 runs north out of Buckhead. The I-285 and I-85 interchange northeast of the city, known to everyone here as Spaghetti Junction, is among the most complex in the United States.

On the surface, Peachtree Street, Ponce de Leon Avenue, Memorial Drive and Moreland Avenue carry the mix of cars, buses, pedestrians, cyclists and scooters that produces most of the city’s serious pedestrian and cycling injuries.

The city is a collection of distinct neighbourhoods rather than one centre. Buckhead to the north, Midtown and Downtown through the middle, then Old Fourth Ward, Inman Park, Virginia-Highland, Grant Park, West End and East Atlanta. The Atlanta BeltLine, built on former rail corridor, now links many of them with a multi-use trail that carries very heavy foot and bicycle traffic.

Piedmont Park in Midtown is the largest green space, with Centennial Olympic Park anchoring downtown beside the Georgia Aquarium and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park to the east. Mercedes-Benz Stadium and State Farm Arena bring very large crowds into downtown streets on event nights.

Atlanta is also a university city. The Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, Emory University and the Atlanta University Center, which includes Morehouse College, Spelman College and Clark Atlanta University, are all within the city.

When injuries are severe, patients go to Grady Memorial Hospital, the region’s Level I trauma centre, or to Emory University Hospital Midtown or Piedmont Atlanta Hospital. MARTA runs the rail and bus network, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest passenger airport in the world, sits just south of the city.

What ties all of that together is density of movement. Freight, commuters, transit riders, event crowds, students and tourists all use the same corridors, often at the same hours, and the city’s street grid was not designed for the volume it now carries. That is the backdrop to nearly every serious injury claim that comes out of Atlanta, and it is why the details of where and when a crash happened matter so much to how it is investigated.