have been without work for extended period of time today the president ordered all agencies not to discriminate against the long term unemployed. those are the headlines. i'm tony harris. inside story is next on al jazeera america. >> >> we lost sight of a dirty little secret, traffic is terrible there and often paralyzed when the weather is sunny and warm. america's urban sprawl, on "inside story".

hello, i'm ray suarez. when the polar vortex plunged places into unusually bone chilling territory, americans nodded knowingly, pointing out that small amounts of snow cause havoc in some places, where minneapolis detroit and denver just shake it off. but how much of it is not brought on by a natural event but taxpayers and home buyers, was plenty of notice enough to engineer one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in american history? was it the snow or an unwise toy to grow? there were helicopters in the sky and authorities on the ground racing to help stranded drivers along a debilitated southeast coast and it was all over some two inches of snow!

the storm essentially crippled the american south, leaving drivers locked in traffic jams and their children sleeping on gym floors. governors issued states of emergency. >> i was in my car 18 hours. >> 18, almost 20 hours. >> 24 hours later, the blame-game isen in full throd l. >> why weren't they more prepared for this? >> in georgia the governor took the blame. >> we didn't have enough preparation to encounter the storm in the time it came. >> for not notifying the governor quickly enough. >> i might -- made a terrible error in judgment. >> but as the past bucks flew a per ma -- perm afrost of problems remained.

middle class migration of the '60s and '70s as people flemed to-- complete to plant communities. atlanta, of the 6 million people who lived in the metropolitan area, fewer than 10% live in the city itself. the rest live in suburbs with their own local governments and mayors. it's a common story in the sun belt. in the next major city over from atlanta, montgomery, alabama there is a likability score of 25. in 2012 there was a proposal to build alternative transit for atlanta suburbs including a rail line downtown but it was rejected by two-thirds of voters. many suburban it' it i it ite cb

of this problem and the part that the hurting so many folks is people being stranded primarily on our highways and interstates right now. that is the toughest part of this problem and that is the problem that i alone with our state leaders are getting ready to solve. we're going to get folks out of these cars. >> but people bemoaning weathered induced paralysis says, it is not just the makeup of infrastructure. this isn't the first time that snow has brought stand stills to southern states. and ice storm also grounded cars and thus daily life to a halt in 2011. goes the built environment have something to say how we cope with unusual events, have we created a network of communities

places to work, shop and relax that workforce us and work for us in all kinds of weather? from chicago we're joined by john norquist, and chris clemek. professor of history, specializing in urban america and robert brugman, professor of history at the university of chicago and author of sprawl, a compact history. john norquist, you were the mayor of milwaukee for years, a place that gets its share of snow. were you sympathizing with the folks in atlanta that saw what was falling and saw what was happening? >> well, some really serious things happened including some deaths. so there's nothing to feel good about or anything. i think northern cities have a lot more experience with snow.

the big thing about atlanta though, it is so dependent on a freeway system that is so overbuilt, that it tends to fail when you need it the most. at peak traffic hours, every day it tends to fail. and then when you have an episode like an ice storm which they're not used to dealing with, the freeways fail. whereas, the mayor was absolutely right, the secrete grid in atlanta was largely completely productive and useful to people. because they were able to do their job and get the salt out on the streets. and the streets tend not to overload as much as trying to put all that traffic in these giant roads. >> so was it a lack of options? if you said oh man, i'm getting off this choked, stopped highway, could you thread your way home through mile after mile after mile of surface street? >> you could. although atlanta's d deemphasizd

its street grid over the last few years. i mean the state of georgia has spent so much money on these large, grade-separated roads that it's -- you know it's really become the pattern. if you look at meuf houston when hurricane rita was about to come, freeways came to a complete halt. there were fires that happened. there were 50 people that died in the traffic, huge traffic jam that happened. so these roads work fine at 2:00 in the morning generally, they work fine when they're not stressed with peak traffic. but if you look in europe and canada for that matter, there's almost no freeways in the large cities, in canada they stopped building them back in the '60s. and one of the reasons for that

of course is in canada there's no national highway program, no national transit program. so they spend things -- they spend their own money on what they think will add value to the cities. so all the cities in canada have good transit and somehow miraculously, all the roads connect between provinces without an interne interstate hy program. and in america, our roads don't work well in a crisis. >> how different as mayor norquist mentioned and even our north america neighbor, canada. >> i think that's an interesting question because we tend to think of the united states as the distinctis distinctively sun nation. that may be one of the ways the united states may or may not be exceptional. the first nation to reach a kind of suburban majority if you want

to measure that. we urbanize a little later than our comparative industrialized countries and it was oant the 1920 -- only the 1920s that the majority of americans were living in cities. generation or so later. in the 1970 census confirms that more americans live in the suburbs that live in the rural areas or traditional urban areas. that's the path we've been on in a kind of aggressive way. i think there are a number of factors that you know we can point to as catalysts for that. some are technological factors, you know cheap cars, cheap gas. some of them are public policy factors, you know, things having to do with subsidies for all sorts of infrastructure, the most famous of course being highway infrastructure that we were just talking about. but the little less visible

because it doesn't get funded from the federal level, other kinds of infrastructure, utilities, sewerage, water, schools, public investments that have underwritten a certain pattern. they've been public decisions that we've made. but underneath all of it i think are a certain set of cultural impulses that predate any of those policies that we want to talk about. and those cultural impulses aren't as uniquely american as we'd like to think. if we look at the late 19th and early 20th century canadian suburbs are growing in a very aggressive way without any of that sort of infrastructure support that i was talking about. all the major industrial centers, paris, berlin, london they're sprawling tao too right through the -- too right through the beginning of the 20th century. but when the public policy diverges we go in a different direction and that leads the united states onto a different

sort of path. >> professor brugman, you've looked at this, is it the personal choice and sort of accumulated set of millions of americans deciding to live a certain way? or sit really governments and leaders -- or is it governments and leaders offering precooked set of choices that brings you a three hour commute across the atlanta metro? >> i think it's both government and individual choices but i don't think it's specifically american. virtually everything that's been said about cities in like atlanta is also true of cities in the northeast, and true of european cities. if you look at paris you see the same thing. you see that maybe one out of five people in the paris metro area lives in the city. and four out of five live in the suburbs. most of those people in the suburbs live in single family houses or very small apartment buildings. most of them take the automobile

for their daily needs. so -- and the paris and europe generally are building a tremendous number of highways. in fact they're getting new car ownership rates higher than we are and building more highways than we are. we actually stopped building most of our roads nt in the '60s and '70s. sprawl has become the predominant choice for middle class people throughout the world. it's not just true in ufs and europe. it's -- u.s. and europe. it's choice -- >> hold onto that, i want to get specifically to choice because the people in atlanta this week that we saw stranded on those highways seem to have very little choice about how to get around and their kids had no choice about how to get home from school and on and on and on. so the availability of choice is something that we're going to

take a look at when we come back. this is "inside story".

>> al jazeera america is a straight-forward news channel. >> its the most exciting thing to happen to american journalism in decades. >> we believe in digging deep. >> its unbiased, fact-based, in-depth journalism. >> you give them the facts, dispense with the fluff and get straight to the point. >> i'm on the ground every day finding stories that matter to you. >> in new orleans... >> seattle bureau... >> washington... >> detroit... >> chicago... >> nashville... >> los angeles...

>> san francisco... >> al jazeera america, take a new look at news. >> welcome back to "inside story." i'm ray suarez. bad traffic jams are a way of life in washington, d.c. where our studio is loaghted and count -- located and countless other studios in the united states. that's what happened this week in atlanta and it got us thinking about the consequence he of sprawl in our country and john norquist in chicago, you wanted to break in on the professional's point. >> the only reason automobile ownership is going up in europe, if you count the communist countries where people couldn't afford to own automobiles. western europe is very similar to the u.s., bmts are dropping there is spreading, we should

distinguish between spreading and sprawl. human beings are always going to look for somewhat more space. bob brugeman and i both live in dense areas. some people want a wig yard, i don't have any problem with that. but -- big yard. i don't have any problem with that. but if you look at the difference between europe and the united states, in europe they're eliminating freeways. the only grade separation in pairist, the autoroute poppedou, will be gone next year. they have a necklace of light rail lines that they're building around pairs. , the notion that europe is becoming more auto-centric is ridiculous. there are roads that go between cities not roads that go into the middle of the metropolitan area. and in the u.s. these roads that

go in the middle of the metropolitan area cause more problems than they solve. they reduce the value of the neighborhoods where they're built and they aren't being build new anymore, for the most part. there are a few cities where they are. the trend is definitely more towards transit, urbanism. i think atlanta can benefit from that trend. >> professor, you heard robert brugeman before the break, talk about sprawl, that ends up us with the environment that we are. atlanta and all of georgia in fact had a choice to make and they turned down by a sizable margin a set of initiatives where they would have taxed themselves. it was called a transportation special purpose local option sales tax or tsplost, and they decided not to tax themselves to build these links and here we

are. you do end up with an auto dependent at least the periphery. >> yes, i think auto-dependency is an important piece of this. but i think in some ways is a knock-on effect of the deeper cultural and political inclinations and choices. and you know i agree with both of your other guests in a sense of i think there are some deep impulses that you know human beings have to improve their physical surround beings and their setting and i think you know when you think about cities they've always been a kind of tension within them i think between se centrifugal forces. all sort of economic cultural sexual you name it they're marketplaces. they also concentrate negative sorts of effects, vice or pollution or crowding.

so people have always had some inclination to strike out for a little better spot. maybe not too far. you know for most of human history that was only available to the smallest elites so they had urban pied-a-terres and wurntiooncewe had this opportuno urbanize, acquaint victorian villages, i think that was the crucial dna mutation that said we'll have a separation of work and residence and people will begin to sort themselves out according to their ability to purchase transportation and lodging. so you know to me that was sort of when the dye was cast in a deep way. the next big set of choices that we had were in the mid 20th century when politically

americans had become the first real auto-mobile nation. cars were enormous luxury at the turn of a century less than a generation later there is one car for every five americans. we can literally get everybody in a car on if road simultaneously. we made a lot of those as market choices. and european even near european comparatives like britain, france and germany won't get any close to that market penetration of cars until the 1970s. these choices were more important than the individual market choices. we chose to put into place public policies that basically prixgd through housing -- prixgd througprivileged, single familye ownership communities on the periphery, and predominantly at

least initially in racially greategreat -- segregated sortsf appearance. the subsequent effects of them kind of limited the range of choices for other americans. >> we're going ogo to a break for just a second. but robert brugeman for a long time the retailers were telling customers, drive until you qualify. that's what they did. they droif far away from where they worked, far away from the center of metropolitan areas until they could afford a house. now they're findin finding thatr cost of transportation has skyrocketed. it's hard to undo that, isn't it once you've undone it? >> well, i don't think realtors had to convince people. i think people made that choice based on the available opportunities that they had. but to go back to atlanta for a moment, let's do a reality check here. atlanta is very little different

from l mow most american cities, denser or less dense. atlanta has a public transportation system that's actually right in the middle of american cities. it doesn't have as much public transportation as new york for example. on the other hand it has much more than many other cities. and the average commuting time in atlanta is relatively low, it's about half that of the new york metropolitan area and much faster commuting times than in paris. so we're, i think the idea that somehow atlanta is out there at the edge or u.s. is different from europe is completely belied by the actual evidence. >> we'll come back after a break. i want to talk more about what happens when the weather goes wrong. we're going to take a short break and when we get back we'll talk about whether our optimal systems are also our operating systems. this is "inside story."

senior aids. he has told the if the that he could lose power here, if he doesn't quash the rebellion. so very different messages from very different sides. reflecting the kind of tug of war between east and west over ukraine. all of the violence there so he may not known exactly what to do, but

>> welcome back to "inside story." i'm ray suarez. our love affair with the automobile changed the american landscape. more and better roads brought the country closer together while simultaneously isolating us in separate communities. we're continuing our conversation now on the complex impacts of sprawl. still with us john norquist, chris klemek and robert brugman. you heard robert bruman put atlanta under the pack. should it operate normally on most days or when it's under stress? >> i think there is a distinction, two different arguments going on here. should there be giant grade separated freeways in the middle of cities, do they help cities function better? the answer to that is no. if they had to spend their own

money, cities wouldn't build them in the first place. it comes from outside, from the state and federal government and so they build it. and when they need it the most, it fails. so what you have is a malfunction of the system. and it gets heightened by the fact that atlanta's a warm weather state for the most part so they're not used to dealing with snow. i really -- you know, i think it would be about for atlanta to have more transit. i don't think that atlanta needs to try to be manhattan. i think it's okay if somebody wants to live in a single family house 20 miles away from town or whatever. the question is: what do you want to pay for? and in the united states, all this money has been spent on roads. and it doesn't necessarily add value to cities. look at detroit. detroit has built every freeway the michigan d.o.t. has dreamed up and it doesn't have a lot of congestion. it doesn't have a lot of

congestion anymore but it's depopulated. it's a place that is just covered with these freeways and they haven't helped the city at all. there's only one store -- there's only one store in all of detroit that has more than 50,000 square feet. and that's a heavily subsidized whole foods that was just built. >> let me turn to robert brugman then. should we be making smarter choices, better choices from what we build here on out? >> i certainly think smart is better than dumb but for people who say smart growth is the answer meaning more transit, i think that more transit is not necessarily the answer. i think that calling the detroit, thinking that detroit has failed because of its highways, is ridiculous. it's failed because of a lot of bad policies but not necessarily those transit policies. now you -- >> but professor recently in recent past, cities as diverse

as los angeles and salt lake city have put in transit systems and they've been more popular than anyone would have guests after they did it. >> yes they are. but they are absolutely insignificant in the larger scheme of things. there's other than in like three or four larger cities, new york, chi, boston, san francisco, they have something -- they have an enormous transit of all united states. while we're talking about los angeles or salt lake city or portland, we're talking about well under 10% of the trips are going by that transit. so they're very expensive. they carry few people. and at the same time, they're taking away from the public transportation on buses -- >> okay i'll make you a deal bob. eliminate the federal -- all the federal transportation programs and let the market dictate what happens. don't have any federal d.o.t. i'll tell you right now that that will be better for transit, and it won't pay for a lot of the highways that you want to

build with taxpayer money. >> we're very close to the end of our time professor klemec, one thing that's common, you'll only have about half a minute. everything we've wanted to do has gotten more expensive by waiting. >> public utility fragmentation, that obstacle results from, whatever the choices we've taifn before, white flight and other things are, atlanta in particular but american cities in general have something that is distinctive from urban sprawl is they have vulcanized landscape of separately incorporated municipalities. secretary hood called it, particularly when we were going to take transportation planning he offer even snow plowing, it makes it hard for collective action he. >> that brings us to the end.

in washington i'm ray suarez. thank you for joining us. see you next time. >> the epic battle of david and goliath is depicted here in the recent series, the bible. and every child knows how the story ends. the stone from the shepherd's sling strikes the phi philistine in the head. perhaps david wasn't the underdog we all thought it to