My husband commuted from Athens to Tech every day for several years. (Obviously, car commute. That's 70-odd miles.) We were going to move to East ATL but ended up coming back to Boston, and all I have to say about that is that I feel FAR safer driving my car in Boston than I ever did in Atlanta! If we move back (unlikely, but the husband is surprisingly less resistant than he used to be), we'd try to buy in Candler Park or Decatur.

The Atlanta PATH is great, and the users - at least the ones in the Candler area - are friendly and use the path appropriately. It seems that bike friendliness is really neighborhood-influenced; the East ATL, Candler, Inman, Va-Hi, Decatur axis is somewhere I'd be a lot more comfortable riding than Sandy Springs or Buckhead.

As far as Athens goes, you can't hardly drive through town or in the surrounding farmland without tripping over a paceline. Roadie heaven.