Originally Posted by
BluesDawg
Touche. But the real point is that the traffic disaster in Atlanta is far more complex than driver ignorance of how to drive in snow. It involves overdependence on automobiles for transportation, lack of coordination between various cities, counties, school districts and businesses. With the infrequency of frozen precipitation in the South, it is hard to justify the expense of adequate equipment to keep the streets passable under these conditions, especially in a political climate of austerity.
The biggest blunders were the decisions to open the schools and government offices on a day when ice and snow was predicted to fall during the day and then sending everyone home in the middle of the day. Putting that many cars on the streets of Atlanta at once would have caused almost the same mess without the layer of ice topped by snow.
But, of course, if they had cancelled school and closed offices and the weather didn't arrive until 7pm, they would have caught crap for that, too.
Here is the best article I have seen on the situation.
This is true. 6 centimeters of snow is pretty trivial, you can ride a road bike with 23mm tires in it as long as it's not packed down into ice, or there's ice underneath. So I doubt that it was just the snow. Even here in Vancouver, where we get maybe two real snowfalls per winter (on average), traffic really slows down when it snows. I even see more traffic backing up on rainy days. So put this into a large metro area that's pretty dependent on cars, and there's no real public transit alternative that covers the entire region, and you're going to end up with quite a mess. And when you've got icy conditions, things are sort of OK as long as you're moving, or the terrain is flat. Once you stop moving, or have to go uphill (even as gentle as an overpass), then wheels start spinning. Since traffic is mostly serial (and not parallel), you start to get bottlenecks. So like the article above says, the fault is more with the existing infrastructure and lack of coordinated transit.
Luis