Posted on: July 19, 2016
Today marks the last day of AmericasMart, one of downtown Atlanta’s big events. How has the influx of visitors affected traffic downtown? While we can’t correlate traffic conditions directly with AmericasMart opening times, we can look at general traffic conditions nearby to get an idea of roadway congestion.
The charts below use INRIX data to take a look at traffic on the Downtown Connector during the past week of AmericasMart festivities, June 12-18. The charts show data for northbound and southbound travel on I-85 from Exit 244 (University Ave) to SB Exit 249C (Williams St.).
The first chart below is northbound traffic, the second is southbound. The charts show a set of “columns” for each day of the week, representing time during the day from left-to-right (8:00AM to 8:30 PM). The roadway diagram on the side of the charts shows the order of exits along this length I-85. The area across the chart parallel to each exit “sign” indicates the speed for that stretch of roadway, by time and day of the week. Red indicates slower speed, green is faster.
Looking at the northbound chart (click to enlarge), traffic was especially slow in the Downtown Connector on July 15. The red and orange colors are spread out almost across the whole time period this day, meaning that traffic was slow from roughly 8:00 AM – 8:30 PM, beginning at the University Avenue exit and continuing north through the Williams St. exit.
On the southbound chart we can see similar patterns for most days of the week starting around 4:00 PM (except for lighter traffic July 16). The long red bar for July 17 shows that traffic was much slower that evening compared to other days. 
Source: INRIX
