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It was horrible. It took 5.5 hours to get home, a 23 mile drive. Disabled and abandoned cars everywhere, blocking streets. Stuck in gridlock, a lunatic got out of his car and ordered me to back up. After exchanging a few words, he ripped off my windshield wiper. I drove home in the snow and rain with one wiper. Scary.
There were strong winds and blizzard-like conditions until the temperature rose above freezing, at which point it rained. The expectation was for 1-2 inches of snow and then rain. Everyone was taken by surprise as the weather conditions deteriorated.
Didn’t this happen frequently last year?
I would think clearing the streets would be one of the most basic things a city would do on behalf of its taxpaying citizens.
We were in D.C. once for the March for Life, and the entire city went into panic and shut down over 1 inch of snow; I am never clear on how much of this is being unused to snow and how much is government incompetence. Here in Massachusetts, the government subs out much or most of the cleanup to private contractors: every other guy with a truck has a snowplow attached to it in winter, and they make good money helping with the cleanup. But we get a lot of snow; it isn’t worth it to invest in a plow for your truck if you live in an area that doesn’t get a lot of snow.
You would think.
A coupl’a years ago, Spartacus left Newark NJ just impassable for days after a heavy snow. It seems that to close a budget gap, Spartacus sold the snowplows. (It’s hard to run for Senate when the city you run has a million dollar budget deficit ). No, really. He did that.
He then hired private contractors to plow Newark’s streets. But the contracts didn’t stipulate when they had to plow. So when faced with the choice of plowing the local mall who was paying cash on the barrelhead to plow the parking lot right now vs plowing Newark streets whenever … the contractors pushed Newark to the back of the line. Newark was literally closed for almost a week. That is the level of Spartacus’ management acumen.
You would think, but the government in these states are to preoccupied harassing business owners and tax payers to deal with the basic running of government.
Since they are a few miles past the Mason-Dixon line DC considers itself the South and acts like snow is rare. New York, however, gets snow every year and usually (at least in the past) handles it well. This storm was a bit of a mess but it went off as predicted, so it didn’t catch anyone off guard. I know someone who spent almost six hours to go seven miles on the Palisades Parkway last night. No reason for that except mismanagement.
And then he posted pictures of himself shoveling driveways . . . so people could get out to the unplowed roads?
I love living in Florida. And I don’t miss the winters from Colorado and Massachusetts.
The man’s a prince
I’d need to see some data on how previous administrations have managed snowfalls of similar severity before passing judgement.
If a city infrequently receives severe snowstorms, it can make sense to accept the costs of lost productivity rather than incurring the costs of increased snow removal infrastructure.
Snow removal is expensive. It’s one of the top budget items for cities like Montreal and Ottawa (two cities that have some of the best snow removal operations on Earth). But these cities get heavy snow throughout the winter, every winter.
If you don’t get relatively constant snowfall over every winter season it means all that snow removal equipment and staff will be sitting idle most of the time.
This is why Toronto, like NYC, occasionally gets “shut down” by snow. Thanks to Toronto’s unique geography they only get heavy snow once in a while (the wind usually blows it across Lake Ontario and dumps it on Rochester NY instead). As such, they don’t spend nearly as much on snow removal and when the occasional big storm does hit Toronto the rest of the country makes fun of them for being so uncanadian.
Perhaps the residents of New Jersey and New York can take a lesson from the voters of the city of Chicago in 1979.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-the-blizzard-that-got-jane-byrne-elected-20141114-story.html
Basically you can draw a shallow arc from say Philadelphia through St Louis to Denver. If you are on that line or north of it , you get snow several times every winter. NYC fits all the sanitation trucks with plows. So they have several thousand pieces of equipment available. But they do no good if not deployed in time.
Mayor De Blasio had a sound explanation, “Bad luck“, so it wasn’t his fault.
Two problems.
First, unplowed streets, like rusting bridges, are a symbol of the need to raise taxes. They thus get deliberately deprioritized.
Second, for Democrats, plowing the streets is a subsidy to the evil commuters from the suburbs (who probably voted for Trump)
Oh. Well, never mind then.
Mark Steyn:
Read the whole thing:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0109/steyn011909.php3
So he gets a participation ribbon, then?
(Houston manages to keep going after six inches of rain. It takes 20 or more – like Hurricane Harvey’s 40 inches – to bring the town to a grinding halt.)
Six inches isn’t a severe snowstorm. Fifteen inches is. I can get to work (about a 15 mile drive) in my very-light-in-the-ass pickup through six inches. Fifteen would be problematic.
My daughter works in Manhattan, and called me late (3:30 PM) to say she was on a bus home and ask me to pick her up at the Rockaway Mall, since she thought her car’s tires weren’t good enough to manage the drive home. So I left at 4:00PM to get her. Normally from my house in Wantage, takes about 50 minutes to get to the mall, but last night Hway 15 Southbound was closed, so I took the back roads through the hills, and got to the Mall about 3 hours later, at 7:10 PM. She was still on the bus, originally called from Parsippany at 3:30, and by 7:15 was on HWay 46 in Denville, trying to get back on I80 Westbound, since bus had to detour around an accident site. So she finally got to the Mall at 8:40 PM, 6 hours and 40 minutes or so after she left the Port Authority Bus Terminal. We then drove home, not too bad just 20-25 MPH in 4 wheel drive whole way, but roads were sort-of-open, at least one lane mostly plowed. Reached home at 9:55 PM. Round trip 5 hours and 55 min for a drive that normally takes about 1:40.
From what I saw, everyone driving two wheel drive cars were spinning out, also trucks, and busses. SUVs with 4 wheel drive, getting through just fine, if one could get past accidents, spin-outs, road closures, and collection of idiots driving like it was a sunny day in July.
Roads off the state system in Sussex county were slow to be plowed. No admissions yet, but I suspect they trusted the Weather Report, saying 2 inches of snow then going to frozen rain, and then rain. But at our house in western Sussex county, never went to rain, and only to sleet about 2AM, but light, then heavier snow again 6-8:30 AM as the upper low wrap around went through. Overall we received just over 9 inches of snow. Other reason, it is likely that country only had about half their truck fleet changed over to winter hours, or were short of drivers, since they were still engaged in the more typical fall pursuit of patching holes getting ready for winter, but not yet ready to sand and plow!
This central North Carolina girl is loving this post. 😂
Cleveland, OH, January 1978, Dennis Kucinich, new 25 year old quasi socialist mayor.
14 inches of snow
Long established plowing routines scrapped by mayoral order. Plows dispatched to streets on the basis of complaint calls.
I was there. I lived it. I saw eight or nine cars skid down Edgehill road into a heap of dented metal at the bottom because no one had sanded it.
The left ruins everything.
I spent two winters in Minneapolis (I loved the cold winters, with the sun shining), and they have a very effective snow-emergency system. Minneapolis drivers learn which streets not to park on, due to snow plowing. Streets are almost uniformly cleared rapidly. And it helps that the city is pancake-flat, so no hills to skid up or down.
Seattle is another story. Streets are rarely plowed, and often sanded so they are filthy when the snow melts. A previous mayor refused to use salt on the roads, because he was worried that the melting snow would drain into Puget Sound and cause pollution. No one reminded him that Puget Sound is salt water!
Sounds like Spartacus should be beaten from Fort America.
I’m just wondering, now, how many people in his administration, and works departments were telling him “No! No!” when he sold the trucks. I’m guessing dozens of people were incredulous. Maybe hundreds. Did it anyway.
And….not really shoveling. And everyone knows it. You’d be wearing gloves if you’re outside for an hour, shoveling.
The kind of stupidity and arrogance on display there is what makes people want to punch the people purported to represent them in the plexus.
A lot of alliteration, I know. A pugilistic profundity, profound yet punctilious, providing proprietary personages, properly.
Charlotte, NC boy is enjoying it thoroughly. Having lived most of his life in VT.
@nickh and I are in Charlotte too. We need to have a meet up.
I’m game. We should do it during a winter storm warning here, because everyone else will be at the grocery store buying all the bread and milk.
Well done.