The snow came later than expected. The temperature drop was expected, but the timing was perfect to create chaos in a city with limited snow removal capability.
I live on a hill, and last night my wife and I couldn’t get home. She spent hours stuck in traffic. I was at work quite late and when I left I made 3 attempts to get up the hill. The first and third attempts were blocked by firefighters, redirecting traffic away from the hill. The second attempt involved watching cars slide down two different hills that I was forced to avoid, finally finding my way back down to the main road my school is on.
I did a u-turn at the last attempt and ended up going to a Pho restaurant a block from my school for a warm, slow dinner. Then the main hill that I use going directly up from my school was open and I had an uneventful drive home. That’s not nearly as bad an experience as my wife being in the car for over 3 hours, mostly standing still and waiting, and finally having to go several kilometres out of her way to approach our house from the opposite end.
Still, we were more lucky than the cars that slid uncontrollably into each other on some of the hills we couldn’t get up. (That’s the hill that would have been my 4th attempt to go up, had I not u-turned and headed back to my school).
Our neighbourhood is very hilly, and we end up having events like this once or twice a year. What brings our city to a standstill though is not snow, it’s ice. It’s conditions where the snow comes, it gets compacted by cars, and then the temperature fluctuates above then below zero to liquify and then refreeze the compacted snow into sheets of ice. Hills, ice, and traffic don’t play well together.
This morning I won’t be trying to drive down the hill I came up last night. I’ll drive over to the main road that I know will be cleared since it is a major artery for traffic… (even though that’s the hill that had the most havoc last night). I’ll get to work earlier than usual and make sure the parking lot is safe. But I’m lucky that my school is on the bottom of the hill, closer to the river, and likely not as icy and snow-covered as some of our schools that get much more snow than us. Hopefully the chaos of last night is over.
