I can drive around the entirety of downtown Portland in about 5-10 minutes (depending on traffic). It would take at least an hour to drive around downtown Atlanta.
As someone that lives there let me tell you there is no "downtown" Atlanta. There is a neighborhood called Downtown, but it's one of three (four, or maybe even five, depending on who you ask) major, dense business and retail districts in the city limits, and even more in the suburbs. And yeah, would take you about an hour to hit all of them. Probably more with traffic.
It's a very polycentric city. Kind of throws people off when they first come here.
and LOL at the guy saying "no one wants to live in Georgia." This is what happens when you don't ever leave the Bay.
The 5 and 405 around downtown Portland can be driven in under 10 minutes under ideal circumstances.
Also, your google map link for Portland is bizarre. I honestly have no idea what that route is supposed to represent. It definitely isn’t any route someone would take who was trying to circle downtown Portland.
Both of those routes are trying to contain the tall buildings inside and the single family homes outside. If you expand the route I drew around Atlanta very much in any direction you start to include single family homes.
285 around Atalanta encloses forests and suburbs, a lot more than just downtown.
Anecdote I was told, shows how quickly cities can grow into metroplexes.
Back when Interstate 285 was built, it was a 2 lane road out in the middle of nowhere for the truckers going from Florida north to be able to bypass Atlanta traffic.
Kids could play hopscotch for multiple minutes to hours before moving off to the let the singular car go by.
285 was the orbit of pluto, separating sleepy suburbs from the great flyover nothingness that people ascribe to the empty swathes of, say, Nevada (?).
Nowadays, 285 is more like going from outer core of earth to inner core. Moving from 285s westernmost terminus further west, the analogy of Pluto's orbit is more like Carrollton GA.
Atlanta the city is small. Atlanta as natives know it is large.
Dallas-Forth Worth TX is a twin sister in terms of growth rate but also bigger on an absolute scale.
