Funny, I live in Atlanta without a car. I guess it is a question of being willing to make the effort or just waiting for everything to be served up on a silver platter.

Yes the suburban sprawl surrounding the city is terrible and it does put a toll on the city with major interstates cutting through the heart of town to make it easier for suburb-to-suburb commuters to get around. But the city and the metro, while intertwined, are not that same thing. There are lots of people who live in the city without a car and do just fine. Many of the city's oldest neighborhoods, so called street car suburbs, with shady streets, walkable neighborhood retail, parks, and other amenities that create a great quality of life are accessible by mass transit. The city has one of the strongest tree ordinances in the country and working hard to undo the Robert Moses type mistakes of the 1960s in the central business districts.

Getting off at the AmTrak station and walking around a few blocks tells you as much about the city as does seeing a city from the interstate. I realize that it is trendy to bash Atlanta but some of us are working for real change instead of taking easy potshots on the internet based on limited superficial observations. So how about not condemning everyone in a city based on group think. If people here weren't friendly enough for you, perhaps you should look at your own comments and ask why that might be.

I live downtown, get around on mass transit, my bike, and my two feet. I could move to another city, get a car, feel smug and superior about the appearance of my surroundings while actually living a more environmentally destructive lifestyle but I'd rather walk the walk instead of talking the talk.

Sorry if I sound overly defensive about all of this, but it really annoys me to hear the same old recycled speaking points about where I live. I get tired of hearing it is impossible to live in Atlanta without a car, when I do it quite easily. I get tired of hearing there is no green space in Atlanta when there are two large green spaces right outside my window. I get tired of hearing there is nothing but concrete here when according to the national forest service, this is the most heavily forested major urban area in the US. I get tired of hearing how environmentally ignorant builders are when Atlanta has one of the highest concentrations of LEED certified high rises in the country. Yep, sounds like the absolute worst place in the country!

See this kind of superficial judgment makes me wonder about all of the other observations here and how many of them are similarly based on such shallow observations and guilt by association. Suburban Atlanta does have many terrible characteristics and the city isn't perfect but it certainly isn't the dehumanizing moonscape that many make it out to be.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm biking over to the farmers market to buy some locally grown produce. Since I'm not arriving in my car, I guess all the veggies will be wilted and the fruit rotten. Afterall, you can't get anywhere nice in Atlanta without a ton of glass and steel wrapped around you, right?