This makes the rounds every time we have a crazy heavy snowfall. From the looks of this thread, pretty accurate.
ShivaX
3218
I’m not sure having these dudes stand around and threaten to beat the snow will do anything?
ShivaX
3219
There are hilly places that get snow too.
But as Timex pointed out a lot of it is lack of snow removal gear that’s standard in places that get snow.
And people who don’t know how to drive on snow or ice. But hell, we have that in the Midwest every year.
You’d think people with 30+ years of driving in certain conditions would know how to drive in said conditions, but a shitload of them don’t and rely on anti-lock brakes and the county being generally good at clearing roads to not hit shit/end up in a ditch. But yet they keep ending up in ditches.
I blame a lot of it on anti-lock brakes. Just push the brake harder is good advice until it isn’t and then having the instincts of what to do is invaluable. Driving a front-wheel drive behemoth from the 60’s/70’s is important learning when it comes to shitty road conditions and things not going as planned.
Don’t you mean rear-wheel drive? I don’t recall many behemoths from that era that were FWD. Hell, other than a few comparatively tiny Japanese imports, the only FWD car I can recall was the then-daring Riviera.
I agree about the ABS thing, a bit. I’ve been driving a little Nissan Juke thing the last year. Probably needs new tires, but it’s been just fine in the snow for the last week (AWD for the win). But the one scary moment I had was coming down a steep, short residential road last Thursday- a few days after the snow fell, so everything was compacted and turned to ice. My girlfriend was driving a car behind me by about a block. I went to press on the brake to go down the hill slowly… and it just locked up. And I slid. Brief moment of terror, thought I was going to hit the traffic circle at the bottom, then you remember to pump the brakes instead of trying to stand on them. Slowed down, navigated the circle, and watched her do the same thing.
That was fascinating, thanks!
And looking at his ‘composite score’, looks like Seattle Ranks 13th. What’s above it?
- Honolulu
- LA
- El Paso
- Las Vegas
- Colorado Springs
- Portland
- San Diego
- Portland
- San Jose
- San Francisco
- Nashville
- Albuquerque
Hmmm. What do most of these places have in common? They get even less snow than Seattle.
Edit to add: actually typing in “average snowfall in…” to Google with those city names tells me that Colorado Springs and Seattle are tied for most average snow, at 5.9 inches. Who knew?
ShivaX
3224
I did. My brain is fried atm.
Aleck
3225
To be fair, it’s not really annual any more. Today was the first time in three years we had enough snow to support sledding (something my kids were very excited about). We used to get a couple inches at least once a year, but anecdotally it seems much less frequent. And my suburban neighborhood has not only not seen any salt or plows, but the electric company hasn’t bothered to come out and deal with the tree blocking a local road and taking out power to a neighborhood.
So yeah, we’re just not equipped for the snow. :-) Reminds me of living in Los Angeles and how people would lose their minds when driving in the rain (although, to be fair, LA roads are slick as pig shit during the first rain because of all the oil and whatnot that comes to the surface of the roads).
Heh, no problem. I figured as much. But yeah, those experiences were certainly, um, educational. I remember driving not a behemoth but a Mustang GT, 1985 model, in snow in the DC area in like 1986. Left my office’s parking garage in Tyson’s Corner, during a snowstorm where we got 8", and got across the street to near the 7-11 before leaving it off the side of the road. It was completely immobile, no traction. Luckily I lived a mile away or so and just walked home.
ShivaX
3227
Everyone should learn the benefits of bags of kitty litter in their trunk and the inability to stop reliably.
Instead they charge stop signs at 30 mph and start braking at fifty feet and wonder how this could be happening to them.
As informative as it was, losing one’s brakes completely was also a learning experience, but I would not request than anyone ever have it.
Matt_W
3228
I mean, that list entirely depends on where the boundaries are drawn. I’ll note that San Diego, which is characterized not by beaches, but by canyons as the dominant topological feature, shows up pretty high on all of those lists. But I feel like to do a real comparison, you’ve have to compare the average slope of the roads. Honolulu would plummet out of the lists altogether.
Interestingly enough, there’s an image of San Diego in the article and the highest point within the city limits (Cowles Mountain) is actually just outside the right edge of the picture.
Timex
3229
Because they think that being in an AWD SUV means they can stop easily.
CraigM
3230
Yeah I thought the downtown one was particularly interesting because it really hammers Honolulu for precisely that reason. It also pushes Portland to #1, and having been in most of the high ranking cities I’ll say there is cause. The 1300’ ridge that runs through downtown and across the entire western border of the city may only be a single extended slope, but it has a real measurable impact on the city, and is the reason the city shuts down in snow. It makes traveling between the two main population centers in the metro dangerous.
Bingo. At least for the modern era. Up here in #frozenyankeehellhole, this is the #1 issue I see, especially if you add 4x5 pickups to the mix. The folks who use pickups for work generally understand how to drive them, but the gentleman farmer/urban cowboy types, not so much.
Funny thing is, when I lived in Germany it wasn’t much different. My first winter in Berlin we had some decent snow, and I watched many a BMW and Mercedes slide through intersections as the burgers sat their perplexed that their usual behavior of roaring up to the light and slamming on the brakes wasn’t exactly a recipe for success in the winter.
Everyone likes to laud the Germans for their strict license requirements; people (at least they used to, dunno about now) had to spend considerable sums for professional instruction in order to pass the tests and all. And of course the Autobahn has this reputation as some sort of hallowed temple to automotive expertise or something. In my experience, though, the Autobahn was largely a mishmash of three lanes travelling at radically different speeds, which interacted in very harrowing ways, and German drivers in general were sometimes just as bad as Americans.
schurem
3232
If you think German drivers are bad, you have never driven a Dutch, Belgian or God forbid a French highway. Germans are the finest drivers of europe. Courteous and well educated and sticking to the rules.
My point is that all drivers suck; Germans may on average be better than most, but that’s sort of like being the least stinky turd in the midden. Compared to most American drivers, most German drivers are probably more aware of rules and pay them more attention, but the bar is not very high.
It’s also a big difference between urban and rural driving I think.
I’ve had house cats that I’ve barely been able to hold.
Meanwhile, in Kuwait…
Matt_W
3235
I think this snow-driving-expertise thing is a bit of a canard, like when people say they’re good at driving drunk. Everyone is bad at it for their first icy drive every year, then everyone very quickly learns to apply the brakes early and softly, which is really all there is to it. Driving on rough dirt roads is harder and requires more expertise than driving in snow.
Also in my experience, no regional drivers are better or worse than any others. There’s usually a set of expectations, often unwritten, about how traffic works, and that is what varies place to place. In some areas, aggressive driving is common and expected and local drivers are comfortable in that milieu. It can seem chaotic and frightening to non-locals, but it’s not because the locals lack skill; it’s because they approach traffic differently. In city center Hanoi, if you want to cross the street as a pedestrian, you calmly and deliberately step out into traffic and proceed to cross at an even pace as motorcycles and duk duks whiz around you. It’s expected and works… unless you stop, retreat, or do some other unpredictable thing.
Exactly. Everyone sucks, and pretty much everyone eventually learns. The yahoos you see doing yahoo things are often setting out on the first step of that journey.
Tell me about it. I live on one of those roads. We’re happy it’s not paved, otherwise it would be a speedway probably, but in mud season the ruts get to be truly epic. Oddly enough, in snow conditions it’s a damn fine road though, better than the paved ones!
