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Orpheo

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No this is not about people who live in motor homes or about anything organic at all.


It's about snow.

The first day we have one to two inches of snow and the entire country is paralyzed.  Trains inexplicably cease to function. People are running around aimlessly. Government officiaks in charge of saline deposits are crawling all over each other to place the blame with others that there is not enough salt to even pass december despite the fact that winter is kinda an annual thing and Sean Bean warned us that winter really us coming.

Is everybody too much preoccupied with the holidays? Do the costs not outweugh the benefit of having a society that simply can do its job?

Friends enlighten me. How is it arranged where you live? And no wisecrack comments suvh as 'I live in the middle of the sahara so I wish I had snow'. I am really curious to know if this trend of stupidity is global or just regional.
 
Here in Michigan, snow is common and can be severe enough that they don't mess around with low salt supplies or insufficient plowage. Biggest problem is often keeping up with the snowfall or temps too low for salt to be effective, not being short on salt. Plus, being used to it, we don't generally do anything about 1 or 2 inches. Finally, we have a HUGE salt mine, so it's tough to run out.
 
Figured as much. To put it in perspective.

We get 2 yards of snow a year maximum.
We have 200 miles of coastline allowing us to drain salt from the sea.
We have a province thats an entire salt mine.

Still shortages.
 
I don't mean to make it sound like it's all kittens and sunshine here. Public services aren't often bogged down with profit motives or competition, so you rarely get what you pay for. But, in more recent years municipalities are increasingly hiring private firms to handle what have traditionally been public services, so the quality is going up while the cost is going down.
 
Snow in my neck of the woods isn't a rarity, but we don't handle it like places prepared for a lot of it.  We just don't get that much or that often.  2" on the ground, school and work gets cancelled.
 
Orpheo, I live in London and you may as well be writing about my town in your original post. Exactly the same.

In fact I got on a train that was delayed by over 20 minutes this morning, because it is cold and rainy. Er, hello? England?

Cagey, it's funny what you say about the public/private thing. Here everything is gradually being privatised against our will and the whole place is in uproar because so far for everything that's been privatised quality has gone down and price has gone up. (Notably our beloved NHS and, as predicted by Robocop in the 80s, the frickin' police).
 
My last work project, I spent 9 months working on the infrastructure of an electric light rail system.  The last few months when trains were being tested, you learn a little bit about them.

Rain will ruin the wheels of train.  They tend to slide instead of stop.  By design, the wheels are softer than the rail, simply because they're easier and cheaper to repair/replace than the rails.  One day of rain will turn the wheels into a stop sign.  You can even feel it when riding on it.

If it has an over head "hot" wire, freezing rain will act as an insulator.  One solution is to get more trains on the track to keep the ice off of the overhead.  That doesn't akways work, and it has to be done manually, which means the line has to be killed.
 
Jumble jumble. Here exact same thing. Privatising health care, phone, public transportation, and many others. Major. EPIC.

FAIL!!!

@Turboblues why was rain, snow or even leaves on the track an issue in the 90ies before it got privatised?
 
Turboblues here,

I don't know why it wasn't that way in the 90s.  I didn't make that comment about privatization.  But, the transportation aspect is almost always government related.  That hasn't changed.  The prevention aspect, salt/sand, is the newly privatized part.  However, the small town I grew up in, and smaller town I went to college in, had no mass transit system.  The area I'm in now, I've been in for 12 years.  It has a mass transit system, but I've never used it.  I do know things only tend to be important to us as they're happening.  We tend to be the center of our own universes and our long term memory wanes.  My guess is it's always been that way, but 20 years ago didn't happen today.
 
:dontknow: .......... what's snow .........  :icon_jokercolor:

file_zps0e59cc52.jpg
 
I should point out that overall, transport in London is pretty amazing. I just sold my car because I flat out don't need it. Anyone who drives anywhere in London must just be looking for a way to make the journey take longer and be more stressful, while ensuring that when they get where they're going they can't have a beer because they have to drive back. Crazy.

To be honest though, if I had the time, and if the weather was nice, I would walk absolutely everywhere in London. I walked from Chandler Guitars in Kew, where I had dropped off a guitar for a setup, to Earl's Court, for a beer festival, last summer. About 5 miles, but I took my time and stopped off at the pub right outside the Fuller's brewery for a quick pint. Glorious sunshine the whole way. What a great way to travel.

Updown: we get a lot of Aussies here in London. It's funny watching them all rush to the window and stare in wonder at the white stuff falling from the sky when their first British winter arrives :)
 
we always have one day of Icy roads per year here in Texas.. there is no panic... they just close everything instead..
 
Local govt's are strapped for cash so they do the minimum .  I lived at Lake Tahoe for many years , and they always kept up with the snow .  While I was in Alaska they pretty much just let it fall , everyone put on snow tires (usually with studs) in November and that was it. 
 
We just had rain that caused a lot of trouble.  Besides people not remembering what it was and driving like morons (no different from anywhere else), there tend to be other problems as well.  We have about 2-3 weeks of fall, so a lot of leaves accumulate in short order.  When it rains, they turn into muck.  Or the rain knocks the old leaves off the trees, and then turns them into muck.  This tends to cause drainage problems, and flooding happens in localized areas.  This causes the dirt to get very soft and trees to fall over.  Minor clean up there.  Unless it hits power lines, and then trouble happens.  In California, the population has grown very fast, so the power lines are generally enough for their areas.  But, if something goes down, and other areas have to compensate, they tend to overload, and everything goes down down in an area.  It is all really a matter of population, but an inch or two of rain can really stop things around here.
Patrick

 
I've lived in either Ontario or New England for all of my driving years, and it boggles the mind how many people forget how to drive in the snow/slush/sleet that we get every year.
 
Well I lived through Hurricane Sandy in New York this year. I had pretty much the opposite experience. All our transit systems are public run, union, blah blah. Sometimes the whole thing seems to be held together with spit and chewing gum, too. And the hurricane damage was far beyond all estimates. Some very major and hugely expensive downtown manhattan buildings are going to be abandoned because of damage. The subway system was one of the first things to get back on line, in midtown they had to wait for the power to get turned on but other than that the subways were ready to go. Shite can work right if you have competent people in charge, no matter public or private.
 
I was raised in Minneapolis, and it's just part of the landscape. We lived at the top of an alley that was a straight line into the Peterson's garage, so we just backed our cars out the top from December to March, and the Petersons changed out the creosoted logs in front of their garage every few years. Everybody drove as carefully as possible, but we slid into each other a lot too. All just part of the life... One year - SOMEHOW - the city of Minneapolis ran out of money at the end of the year to run the snowplows? And this was before everyone just started printing it whenever you needed it, and stuck some random numbers into computers and pretended, like, "OH YEAH... WE'RE GONNA PAY IT BACK!" So we all just slid into each other for the last three weeks of December 1976? 1977? And the City then told the insurance companies to go stick it, ahh, those were the days... I think. And I haven't been back, took me 13 years in Florida to thaw out.
 
I live in Minnesota, and since I can remember, snow rarely even makes my state blink. Even in a heavy storm, a fair number of folks keep about their business. We just know how to deal with it, the equipment is there . . . snow plows, etc. Even the super rare 3-4 year snow storms get pretty well cleaned up inside of 12-24 hours. The MSP International Airport only closes for the aforementioned major storms and maybe a handful of others . . . same situation ,they just know how to cope and have the equipment.

Snow in Minnesota is such a regular thing that it is well worth the cost of keeping the equipment handy, but for other places, it just isn't worth it. I recall many times where I have heard news of the Atlanta, GA airports closing because of an inch of snow, etc . . . but this is really just because they don't have dozens of snowplows with drivers on-call, and it is good that they don't, it'd be too expensive for the few times they'd actually need them.
 
Super Turbo Deluxe Custom said:
Snow in my neck of the woods isn't a rarity, but we don't handle it like places prepared for a lot of it.  We just don't get that much or that often.  2" on the ground, school and work gets cancelled.
Click to expand...
But you know what we say around here Gary, "if you don't like the weather, just wait 5 minuets and it'll change. Like now, it's early Dec. and in the 70's... :dontknow:
 
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