The Commute From Hell

Commute from Hell

Last night the Northeast was hit by the first real snow for a long time. Certainly it was the first such snowfall of the season. And we have another one tomorrow that may well be worse.

But, as snowfalls go, this one wasn't that bad. I've driven through worse. It wasn't, say, like the Blizzard of 1979 that shut down everything between Chicago and Saint Louis. It wasn't even close to the Blizzard of 1978 which shut down Boston for days. It more resembles the April Fool's Blizzard of 1997, though not as bad. On that April Fool's, in the mid-afternoon, I had a two hour commute. Not bad. I expected it. After all, 20mph, 40 miles. The math isn't that hard.

But yesterday a storm of significantly less intensity hit and the results were much worse.

The problem arose not because of the weather-- which was admittedly bad-- but because of the drivers. People were, for example, aggressively ignoring stoplights. People? Gridlock slows traffic. It doesn't help. But the flaunting of traffic laws wasn't limited to crowds; one SUV I was following whipped through a red light at about forty when there was only a couple of cars about. There was no reason for it save impatience.

There were also people flooring the gas pedal to get up an icy hill, making, you guessed it, more ice. At one point I was sitting behind a Chrysler sedan (buying that car was probably mistake number 1) whipsawing back and forth on a gentle hill, taking up three lanes as the rest of us waited for him to find either traction or flip off the overpass and get out of our way. I went throgh the same patch afterwards with my little Geo metro and just sailed up the hill.

So, here's the Popkes take on driving in snow:

1) Learn to drive your car in all conditions. If you can drive your car in the bright sunshine on dry pavement (questionable for some owners of large SUVs) it doesn't mean you can drive that same car at night on snow covered ice. Go out in a parking lot somewhere and figure it out. If you can't manage an SUV in heavy weather it doesn't matter if it's really fun to drive in nice weather. Get rid of it. If you can't do this, don't drive.

2) If some technique (flooring it on ice leaps to mind) doesn't work, quit doing it. Only psychotics and idiots continue to do the same thing expecting different results. If you can't do this, don't drive.

3) Know the limits of the car in the current conditions. You should be able to feel this. It's a tiny uncertainty in your body that says maybe you're not really in a safe place. Listen to it. Driving on ice is essentially driving on a frictionless surface. It takes very, very little to break the connection and then you're a puck on an air hockey board. Driving on slushy snow isn't like driving on a surface at all. It's driving in a fluid. Turning is more akin to using a rudder than anything else. If you can't do this, don't drive.

4) Slow down. Let me say this again. Slow down. Giving yourself more room to stop doesn't mean adding a couple of feet. In slick conditions it means doubling the space. Tripling it. Slowing down doesn't mean going from 65 to 60. It means going down to 30. If you can't do this, don't drive.

5) Obey the traffic laws. This is, in part, a plea aimed at traffic cops. I know tickets have become a revenue source and speeding tickets the mechanism of choice. But not enforcing most traffic laws in good weather doesn't mean not enforcing all traffic laws in bad weather. In six hours of commuting I did not see a single cop car. Not a single cop directing traffic. A cop either directing traffic at a few intersections would have gone a long way to managing a really, really bad situation. But if you can't obey the traffic laws, don't drive.

6) If you must abandon your car, drive it to the side of the road. (I know. This seems obvious. But last night people were abandoning their cars in the middle of the highway and then the snowplows couldn't do their mostly inadequate job.) If you can't do this, don't drive.

7) Turn off your four wheel drive. 4WD is only really needed in very few circumstances. Think about what happens in a spin. If you have front wheel drive, the front wheels spin and the back wheels act as a drag. If you slow down the car, the front wheels act as a drag and the back wheels are free. In both cases you have one part of the car acting as the center of the spin and the other part of the car acting as a drag on the spin. By changing the drag you can regain control. In rear wheel cars, it's exactly the same except which wheels do what is reversed. It analogous to spinning around a pivot. By altering the nature of the pivot you can change the nature of the spin and regain control.

4WD allows spinning on all four wheels. Where's the pivot? Right in the middle of the car. A 2WD car when it spins looks like it's washing back and forth on the road. A 4WD car spins like a top. You can get the same effect in a 2WD car but you have to be going faster. See #4. If you can't do this, don't drive.

For a lot of the people I saw last night, forget all of the above. Just don't drive.