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Introducing the Snow Driving Incompetence Belt (SDIB)
A snowstorm is currently threatening America’s capital, which has brought out all the jokes about that city’s lousy drivers. This makes me wonder if there is a narrow zone — a belt, if you will — across the middle of the country where one encounters the most incompetence during snowfall. South of this belt, snow is so rare that it generally keeps people off the roads entirely when it happens; above the line, drivers are — what’s the opposite of incompetent? — competent.
I’d like to ask Ricochet members to nominate their home cities for membership in the Snow Driving Incompetence Belt (SDIB). Here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, we’re very safely in the Competent Zone. Places like Dallas and Tampa are solidly in the No Snow Zone.
I’m guessing the SDIB starts in Maryland, passes through Tennessee (or does mountain weather interrupt the belt?), continues on to Oklahoma, and then veers north to Oregon.
Anyone have a better idea of where to draw the line?
Published in Culture
See? I truly do not know where the belt lies. Thanks for all the comments.
Totally disagree. I’ve handled 9″ snowstorms in a 02 Ford Focus with no traction control or antilock brakes and a 2010 Prius (which admittedly had both). It’s about the competency of the driver plus the quality of the car. You can have less of the latter if you have more of the former, and vice versa.
Talk about your precious snowflakes….. I’ve heard that DC is shut down already because of the impending snow. Aren’t we always told that the country will collapse if DC is shut down?
That point was made well in the first paragraph here:
http://ricochet.com/the-weather-and-the-mandarin-class/
I heard they are shutting down the Metro which, I thought, is mostly underground. I would think the subway would be the preferred mode of transportation in a storm. Guess not.
SDIB is also portable.
I was once westbound on I-70 in Colorado. I exited the Eisenhower Tunnel into a major snowdump, and I was startled by several cars — all with out-of-state plates, and most of them sports cars — as they flew past me on the long downhill, in spite of the significant amount of fresh snow on the highway.
A couple of miles later, I was amused to see that they had all spun out onto the ample shoulder, most facing in the wrong direction.
I saw this story on another site – not to get preachy – but it is heading directly for DC and is called Jonah – US Conference of Mayors also taking place :
Mat 12:39 An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Mat 16:4 (repeated again – same verse) An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.
Luke 11:29-30 This generation is an evil generation, it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah.
Same verse – 3 places.
I don’t have time today, but maybe someone could post about it – Signs of the Times? What are the odds this storm would be named Jonah and headed for DC ….. it’s a whale of a storm….!
There are small but significant mini-belts surrounding Air Force bases.
I used to live near and work in Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, and have faced the terror of having an SUV with Florida plates coming straight at me in the snow more than once.
Totally agree. I learned to drive on a ’74 Ford LTD. It was a tank. No front wheel drive, no traction control. Just common sense driving when faced with a change in the weather/driving conditions. I don’t recall ever getting stuck.
My son, who lives in Alexandria, told me the same thing. Would imagine they can’t get people to run the thing.
As a kid growing up in Ann Arbor, there was a game we would play after the first real snowfall. There was a long uphill road called Broadway that led from Central Campus to North Campus. (It was kind of the back way, but shorter than taking Plymouth Road.)
We stationed ourselves at the bottom of the hill, and watched students drive uphill toward the dorms on North Campus. We would place bets on whether they would make it to the top or get stuck in the snow. There were standard odds depending on what plates the car had. Minnesota or North Dakota plates had odds favoring them. A $1 bet they would make it cost you $0.20 if you lost. Florida was just the opposite: 5:1 they would fail. Louisiana was 3:1, Georgia (as I recall) was 2:1.
Two states which were always even odds were Texas and California. The driver might be from the Rio Grande Valley or L.A. and hopeless in snow. Equally they might be from the Sierra Nevadas (or other upland California regions) or Amarillo. Michigan was another, because foreign students often got cars with Michigan plates. They might be from Norway or Nigeria.
Seawriter
Seattle & Portland have to run a close 1 & 2 for snow-driving incompetence. I loathe snow on the roads, yet I have never missed a day’s work because of snow. Yes, Seattle is essentially one series of hills after another, but year after year, people on Queen Anne or Capitol Hill either want to be on KING 5’s news coverage or haven’t figured out the law of gravity wins out over traction when you have no friction.
Also, in that survey of the worst driving metropolises referenced earlier? Seattle and Portland both rated just above Boston.
And yes, it is true, we seem to have lost our ability to drive in the rain. The cumulative effect of California transplants that carried their hydroplaning habits from Carson or Santa Cruz to Bellevue and Federal Way. Rain = freeway freakout = brake lights = unnecessary rear end collisions = horrid traffic. Rinse and repeat.
Stay safe, DC & environs. Stay off the roads once the fun starts.
Utahans also have to climb the learning curve every year. We have a lot of people moving in, and a lot who age into the driving class having only ever driven in the summer.
They’re worried about a power outage causing stoppages underground. How sound that thinking is, I don’t know, but apparently they’re at least trying not to kill anybody this year.
A key difference between good drivers and the hopeless lies in whether one knows there are options beyond slamming a foot on the brake when you loose traction.
Two personal stories:
I was on an overpass that had frozen. I realized I was going to slide into the stopped car ahead. There was no shoulder to exploit. I checked for on-coming traffic, sa (fortunately!) there was none, and calmly steered into the left side of the road.
In a similar case there was a shoulder. I was braking fine but hit a patch of ice on a downward slope. The shoulder was covered with old, crusty snow and I put my right tires on its friction-y surface to stop. I even had the sense to shout to my kids to pay attention and learn what to do in that kind of situation.
So basically I was dumb to get into those situations, but smart to know how to get out of them. Feel free to take your pick of adjectives to emphasize.
It’s so sad when you see drivers who know only one thing: stomp on the brake. (Or spin their wheels once they are stopped.) ABS helps but isn’t enough sometimes. Look for your options, people, and exploit them.
My first car was an ’89 RWD Chevy S-10. It would try to spin out if it looked at ice. While I wouldn’t chance it in really iffy weather (it was just to get me to high school and back anyway) I managed to never get stuck in a ditch, and I can handle a fish tail like a dolphin.
http://ricochet.com/archives/a-defense-of-southern-snow-panic/
I wrote this a few years ago, but it still applies.
What’s a brake? I kid, I kid.
I’m not sure where NYC falls. We get too little snow and have too good a subway to really be in competition. On the other hand, lots and lots of immigrants who didn’t grow up with the stuff. Well, here’s praying for at least two feet to do further research.
I think all parents should order–order!–their teens to take advantage of every snowstorm by practicing doing stupid stuff (spin outs, donuts, locking the brakes) in a nice, big, empty parking lot to find out how a car handles in those conditions. Kids that do that just might turn out to be better drivers.
Among other things, my father was a high-speed defensive driving instructor for his police department. Those were the skid-pad exercises.
When we moved from Orange County, California to Western New York State I didn’t worry about getting around. I figured (correctly, it turns out) that since Western New York gets 100+ inches of snow each winter, they know what to do and how to deal with it. That first winter we studied intently what the locals did and practiced car handling in the snow covered church parking lot. In the ensuing 15 winters, I have not made it to my office on account of weather only 3 times, and only one of those was snow; the other two were ice (a much rarer occurrence here).
Our daughter moved to Raleigh, NC, which she would put solidly in the Snow Driving Incompetence Belt. But, she’d also acknowledge that, as others here have said, for the little snow they get, it would make no sense to have the extensive equipment and people that Western New York has to deal with snow on the roads, or to get proper winter tires for their cars. So, we do not make fun of the inability of people in that area to drive in snow.
Snow report from No. Va. Here it is, with ~6″ more to go today. Those folks outside the SDIB, any words of advice for driving in this stuff?:
Somewhere in here are a few cars:
Oh, there they are:
Fond memories of this in the NKCHS parking lot. Good times.
The first time I ever got behind the wheel of a car was when my dad took me to a parking lot after a snowfall to do exactly that.
My problem driving in snow is not the snow, it’s the other idiots. I’ll stay home rather than commute when there’s more than 2 inches of snow, because I just know it’s going to be a nightmare out there. But I have no problem driving hundreds of miles in snow when I know the roads won’t be crowded.
Reminded me of this:
My takeaway is that Seattleites know that rain is something to take seriously.
Now that El Niño is back in the SF Bay Area, I see cars spun off to the side of the road, presumably driven by idiots who thought they could drive as fast as usual. I feel sympathy for them–provided they didn’t take anyone with them.
Just re: D.C. this has to be a grand illustration of the short memories of liberals. Snow isn’t that rare in D.C.! Oh, I know, “it’s a southern city, after all.” The funny thing is I hear people saying that every time it… snows! But there’s much more to preparing for bad weather than driving, and D.C.’eans prove time and time again that they don’t take their own FEMA’s advice. “What do they stock up on? Bread milk and eggs? What, are they going to survive on – french toast?” (approximate quotation) Love it!
Snow is very rare here in the Central Valley, and serious ice even less. But I also sometimes drive in the mountains surrounding us. When I enter snow country I slow down and, when safe, gingerly apply brakes and steer, just to remind myself how the car behaves. By the way, I do the same thing whenever I drive any vehicle for the first time, no matter what the weather or road is like.
Except for people in 4WD trucks who blast around as if that exempts them from the laws of physics!
I think my friend Dave, who is the video game archivist for the University of Michigan Library, is the only person with a job description more fun-sounding than your father’s.