Originally Posted by
Retro Grouch
My best snow experience was Chicago (I think) in 1978. We had a blizzard that dropped 3' or so.
At that time my commute from Valparaiso IN was an hour and 10 minutes on a good day. The first day the office was open it took me an hour and 5 minutes to get to work only because the hike from where I had to park took longer. The expressways were clear but the people who lived in the city couldn't get to them because the residential streets were impassable so I made record time from Valpo.
To clear the residential streets they first plowed the church parking lots. Then a fleet of tow trucks towed all the parked cars to the church lots. Finally the plows could come in to clear the streets. Some of the snow had to be hauled away in dump trucks because there was no place to stack it. It took weeks.
Next election mayor Bilandic lost his job.
I find the more regularly you get dumped on, the more adept they become at clearing it. Here in Toronto, they consider 15cm as an apocalyptic event, the city is not that good at clearing roads, they tend to do a rough plowing, followed by a spray of brine solution. When we lived in Wiarton, the same 15cm would be considered a light snowfall, and they would simply plow it off the road, sidewalks were handled by snowblowers that would neatly put it on the front lawns of the houses. The town would regularly use front end loaders to remove it from the downtown area. I never did figure out where they actually put that, probably some town properly out in the bush someplace.