Having handled a couple dozen New England winters as a driver, including some rather ferocious New Hampshire ones, I find Seattle's relationship to snow amusing and bemusing.
One of the reasons I came here was to escape the intensity of New England winters. This city can often go a couple of years without appreciable snowfall, though every so often we have a winter with a couple of severe back-to-back storms.
This seems to have a couple of different effects. First, we forget that we can have bad weather and so don't make much of it when it threatens unless we have had a bad storm that we handled badly within the last couple of years. [BTW--When I moved here in the early nineties the city had a grand total of 9 snowplows!] When that happens even the threat of minor snowfall throws the local news media into a tizzy one might expect due an approaching typhoon or tsunami.
There's a reason for it. We don't know how to handle snow. Even I notice that, unpracticed, my winter driving skills have diminished. I can remember thinking nothing of venturing out onto an interstate to go 20 miles to town when successive storms had left a two inch layer of frozen slush topped with 3 or 4 inches of new snowfall. I had studded snow tires, but still. I used to routinely drive a 90 mile roundtrip on a hilly and windy two lane highway to teach a night class after my day job. No sweat, even the night I did a lazy 360 about halfway home.
With the immanent loss of traction, Seattle drivers begin to panic. They start doing things like crowding through intersections and blocking them, presumably because they are afraid they won't get where they are going otherwise. Of course that ends up jamming up things for everyone else. Every storm features abandoned cars on one long hill on the interstate because of the ineptness or unpreparedness of other drivers making it impossible to make the hill, and the abandoned cars further block the route.
I left work one night a couple of years ago as flakes were just beginning to fall, to make the 2.7 mile trip to my house. I was driving my wife's VW Bug--not the best snow car ever. The streets were bare as I pulled out of the lot.
[Sidebar--Seattle is subject more than most places to microclimates where things can be very different on the other side of a hill. It is also hillier than most places that get much snow.]
The first half of my trip was up a long hill with 6 (synchronized) traffic lights along its length. That actually went fairly well until close to the top the street was locked up for 10 to 15 minutes by aforementioned panicked intersection blockers. Got by that and I figured I was home free even though the streets were now well whitened. There was one easy downhill and then another not very steep up hill and then I'd be on my street and close to home.
As I came down the hill and looked ahead I saw three buses stalled out and slightly cockeyed on the ride side of the street but there was space on the left. No problem. Just keep my speed after the slightly inconvenient stop sign and I could get around them to the left... until a transit service truck came down the hill and blocked the lane!
What followed was a lengthy tour of the neighborhood as I zigzagged through, my route being dictated by spinouts. I would not even try a street where someone was torquing their wheels into spins. As I started down one of the last ones I watched an SUV do a 180 before sliding out of my way. I could take a little side street and had one last little left uphill to the block where I lived. I proceeded at a deliberate pace as I turned left to find the 40 feet of street had adults sliding around on cardboard boxes. If I slowed or stopped I'd be walking the rest of the way. Fortunately they were smart enough to get out of the way. The trip had taken just a little less than 90 minutes. There might have been an inch of snow by then.
Almost all of the problems we have with snow tend to come from the general inability to drive in it, compounded by the inclines. We also have that other feature of inclement driving in modern times--the "bullet-proof" SUV driver, who doesn't realize that while he may be able to "go" better than other vehicles, he will have as much trouble as they do stopping, or maybe more. Not a storm happens that you don't see a number of them ditched by the side of the road.
So tomorrow is supposed to bring in a lulu. We're getting ready to hunker down. My wife will be able to make it home because the bus routes to here are pretty flat, unlike our old place where one year a couple of storms in succession isolated us at the top of the hill from any transit.
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