I'm always amused and incredulous when people defend Seattle's paralysis during minor snow "events" ("storm" usually not being very applicable) with the following claim: "Well, those places back east that get a lot of snow, they're all flat. Seattle has hills."
Oh, yeah? Ever been to Pittsburgh (nestled in the Appalachians)? And isn't Beacon Hill named after a hill - in Boston?
Or "back east" like in Spokane, half of which lies in an area called South Hill?
So can we all agree that in frozen conditions, people in Seattle are nincompoops?
An improvement? No.
I happen to live on a steep hill. Last week, we did two things: parked our car on the accessible, flat area a few houses away before the snow started sticking, and then, when it did, watched idiots drive three-quarters of the way up our street and slide backward three-quarters of the way down our street. Rinse, repeat. There's a much more gradual hill two blocks away that gets you to the same place.
That said, the city of Seattle's response to Blizzard '10 was vastly improved over the 2008 debacle, when temperatures stayed low for two weeks and arterials in North Seattle neighborhoods like Greenwood were unplowed a full week after the initial storm.
This time - armed with actual salt rather than sand, and plenty of lead time from unusually prescient weather forecasters - the city mostly got things right. And Mayor Mike McGinn was out of town, so there was no need to plow his residential street before anyone else's (unlike former Mayor Greg Nickels in 2008).
The same cannot be said for the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), which conspired with the aforementioned nincompoops to create utter gridlock on Interstate 5 on the afternoon of Nov. 22.
The backups stretched something like 400 miles in each direction, as everyone left work early at the same time and WSDOT failed to open the express lanes due to icing on the ramps - and WSDOT's inability, presumably, to cope with those dozen or so extra ramps.
As a consequence, we got 800 miles of gridlock, people abandoning their cars on the freeway (never a winning strategy) and the more sensible people staying in their running cars, in freezing temperatures, for hours on end.
All this over what in many areas was about 2 to 3 inches of snow.
Driving tips
How can our response to snow events get better? It's not a rhetorical question, as La Niña makes more such weather fairly likely this year. Here's a quick checklist:
Stay home if you can. If you can't, use public transportation, if available.
If you need to drive, don't panic. (Thank you, Douglas Adams.) - Driving in snow really isn't all that difficult; ask anyone who grew up in it. (A large, but not large enough, portion of local residents.)
Avoid hills, or take gradual, sloping ones.
Keep your speed slow and steady.
Allow plenty of stopping distance.
Don't stop when going uphill.
Choose bare pavement, then unpacked snow, then packed snow or ice (in that order) for your lanes.
Pump your brakes rather than stomping on them if you slide, and, again, don't panic.
And remember that in half of Seattle, during "snow" events, the stuff isn't even sticking on the pavement - treat it like rain with worse visibility.
Above all, watch out for the other people. They're the real danger.
A good summation of tips for driving in frozen weather is at http://www.weather.com/activities/driving/drivingsafety/drivingsafetytips/snow.html.
Take some time to plan a flat route. There's really almost no part of Seattle that can't be reached via a relative flat or gradually sloping arterial - it's just not always the most direct route. Use it.
City crews generally did a much better job this time than in 2008, but one area for apparent improvement is closing obviously unsafe hills sooner.
Queen Anne's Counterbalance became a YouTube sensation for the yahoos in four-wheel drives trying to drive up the hill and playing bumper car on the way back down. Plenty of streets remained open long after they were obviously unsafe for driving.
Can Metro please, please redesign its website so that bus-route cancellations in bad weather get homepage prominence? As is, one needs to navigate the site and search for their route, and many people who only use buses in bad weather don't even know what route they'd normally use, let alone the one a few blocks away because the closer one isn't running.
Metro also has an audio feed it sends to bus drivers with current updates on street conditions and route changes - put that on the Web, too. It's not difficult
The state DOT has no excuses. It's not like they don't know how to cope with bad weather: The same people manage snow in the mountain passes seven months a year.
Know that when it snows during the day, people will leave work and school early - all at the same time. Plan accordingly.
And for God's sake, salt the express-lane ramps.
GEOV PARRISH is cofounder of Eat the State! He also reviews news of the week on "Mind Over Matters" on KEXP 90.3 FM.[[In-content Ad]]
