the one about snow

Facts:

1. I live in the City of New York.
2. I grew up in Western New York.

These two powers combined make me a Snow Authority. Meaning: I know snow, and I know mismanaged snow.

The first 12 years of my life were spent in the confines of a city in Western New York (think Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse). We had a lot of snow days. Because we could easily get 2 feet of snow in a day. And the city could certainly handle it. But let me paint you a picture:

Say you have an intersection. So you have 2 streets and 4 sidewalks combining. 2 feet of snow have fallen, and both streets and sidewalks are plowed. What do you get at the corner? A 10-foot mountain of snow.  Give or take. My math skills leave something to be desired, but it divides up like this:

Original 2 feet of snow + street 1's 2 feet of snow + street 2's 2 feet of snow + sidewalk 1's 2 feet of snow + sidewalk 2's 2 feet of snow = 10 feet of snow.

You know what's not 10 feet tall? An elementary school child walking to school. Roads and sidewalk could be clear, but school would be canceled so as not to endanger children walking to school, who would be invisible to drivers behind 10 foot piles of snow.

At the age of 12 I moved to a suburb on the shore of Lake Ontario. We got lake effect snow. White-outs, craziness, etc. School canceled less there than anywhere else because this township could open a university on snow removal. If they hadn't been so prepared, we may not have had class from December to April. No joke.

i moved to the City of New York after college. And in recent years we have been getting some serious blizzards. I have passed the point in my life where it snows 10 inches and I say, "That's not a blizzard! That's a dusting!" Because in New York, people see a flake and freak out. There is actually no place to put the snow. I recognize that. I would not want to have a car to dig out.  And some trains literally cower in fear. Me, I pull on my bear hat and trudge through, thankful for the property owners who have shoveled their sidewalks by the time I leave for work. 

I wasn't in the city for Snowpocalypse 2010. I got back 2 days later to semi-plowed streets. I live in an outer borough, and our mayor (or whoever was in charge) made it abundantly clear that the outer boroughs might as well be on Mars. We took a cab from the train station, and the cab driver--who said he lived one street over from us and his street hadn't been plowed yet--told us he had good news and bad news when he approached our block. Good news: Street was plowed. Bad news: Someone was moving so he couldn't get down the street. Caveat: There was one small side street prior to our building and the moving truck. Had this street been plowed, we could have been dropped off 1 block closer to home instead of using our rolling suitcases as snowplows in the middle of that intersection.

That night we were so excited to see the true toll the blizzard had taken--2 feet of snow, remember--that we went out for a walk at 11:00 at night. What did we find? On a main street--a commercial street--three enormous plows went by. The street didn't have a flake of snow on it, so the plows just made a lot of noise. To get to this street we passed at least 5 streets that were completely unplowed. We later learned that the City has no plan when it sends the plows out. They literally just plow wherever they want, and I'm positive it's easier to plow where there is no snow. And commercial streets are more important. Because people need to shop. And they can, when their streets aren't plowed and they can't get out.

Please allow me to hit my head on my desk now.

All weekend we heard about the blizzard ready to strike this week. I was so excited last night. I had Weather.com and MTA.info and my employer's web site all open. The radar said it was snowing. I looked out and saw snow on the ground but did not see snow in action. It was the tiniest, fastest-moving snow I'd ever seen. And by this morning we had about 8 inches of it. Let me be a Western New Yorker for a minute. Not. A. Blizzard.

But 8 inches of snow in New York is a lot like 2 feet in Rochester.

And under that snow is trash from before the first blizzard. Did I mention the sanitation department does the plowing?

Only in New York.