I think we better hope that killer bees invade us from Texas, or something else to take our mind off the snow, before we all suffer snow insanity and go blind from attending too many City Council meetings to demand more salt.

1) sand and salt when the first flakes hit the ground
2) get the plows on the trucks and start plowing early
3) send drivers out to eastern Washington or the mountain passes once or twice a winter for some practice
4) plow to the sides, not the center
5) deploy loaders and dump trucks to actually remove snow from key intersections
6) coordinate with Metro more closely
7) put into effect a snow emergency route designation and tow parked cars if needed

Questions for Seattle DOT:

1) Do we really have a stockpile of left-over salt from when we still used it? The Times reported that we did.
2) How long did it take to “dress the fleet” with plows, and when was the decision made?
3) Did you really run all 30 trucks 24 hours a day throughout the storm?
4) Could we contract with our refuse haulers or local excavation contractors for additional plows? No one knows the streets better than the guys picking up the trash.
5) How hard would it be to keep the SLUT up and running under icy conditions? Should switch heaters be installed?

i was actually thinking the city should be in the business of declaring a ‘city holiday’ when the weather got too hectic. There’s no point to everyone struggling out of bed, trying to see if transit is working, possibly being injured or killed trying to get to work — all for what will be a 10% productive day at best.

Just shut it down.

First of all, hospitals could work for a while without many doctors around. It’s the nurses, janitors, housekeepers, radiology techs, cooks and other various and sundry folks who are needed in large numbers and who are more likely to rely on public transit than a physician is–and without those folks a hospital just don’t run.

Despite my disgust for the curmudgeons and cranks complaining that the city didn’t engineer its way through adversity, I do think there are some lessons to be drawn here.

One is that Seattle puts too little priority into keeping the streets operable for transit (and even less for pedestrians). That’s true too much of the time, but was manifestly true during the snow days. The city sometimes forgets that they have the biggest role in making transit work – my guess is that they’d rather blame our transit problems on the suburban majority that runs the county. When the snow starts falling, we start to see where the real priorities are. The city needs to understand that they are the transit provider (since they operate the transit right-of-way), and make a real effort to clear the key bus streets.

The other is the importance of transit information. This was the first time that Metro had a website with snow advisories – kudos! But those advisories weren’t always correct. And worse, it seemed that Metro felt that putting information on the website is an excuse not to provide the more traditional types of customer information. When they canceled my route this week, was I expected to know to look at the website to find that out? Why would I do that when the streets have been clear all weekend? Why didn’t they put a sign at my bus stop when they are paying bus drivers not to drive my route? I don’t like being left at the curb by someone I’m relying on for a ride. If it was a friend that treated me that way, eventually I’d find a new friend that would at least call before leaving me high and dry.

The revelation for Metro ought to be the importance of providing real-time, accurate information. There should be staff in the control center devoted to informing the customer, and a small team of IT people making Metro’s information more available on the smart phones almost everyone will be using to figure out what’s happening by the time the next snow emergency comes along. The takeaway should be a recommitment to the customer, especially when operations are difficult.

It’s like keeping a second car to get to work when your first car isn’t available. The second one has to be insured, licensed, and driven regularly to keep the battery and fuel fresh. How much is all of this costing you?

Frankly, I don’t think the state will be very interested in leasing excess snowplows from the city that they have to give back to the city whenever it snows.

If the people want to spend more money on all of this, sure. But maybe a well-designed and maintained rail transit system would give more bang for the buck. A switch heater you’re not using should be cheaper than a snowplow you’re not using. Maybe there should be at all times more non-articulated buses than we have right now.

In any case, calling for widespread changes when we haven’t really seen any reliable summation of what happened seems a little premature.

And for heavens sakes- lost productivity? Who are we kidding? Nobody in their right mind plans for high productivity in the third and fourth week of December. Oh sure, retailers and the Post Office. But even the retailers are more and more on line, and the Post Office always fills huge warehouses with junk mail in December. But the schools close down, the doctors and lawyers go on vacation, and half of everyone else is visiting relatives somewhere.

I’ve been trying to figure why this was never a big deal in the past, and the only thing I can come up with is that maybe people expected there would be some bad weather in winter. Maybe part of being happy is just not being crabby.

//Mr. Regula likes hard rubber or composite plastic blades on his plows because they do less damage to streets. “It acts like a squeegee on the road,” he said. Mr. Timpone prefers traditional steel. “It gives us much more ability to cut ice,” he said.

But Sandalo Simonetti, the highway superintendent of North Hempstead, L.I., cares less about the material than about the distance the blade is mounted above the road surface. Manhole covers can ruin a blade or pitch a driver through the windshield, he said.//

Hmmm…

The rubber on the plow blades should have been fixed fast, especially since SDOT talked long and hard about how much work they’re going to do on the streets, thus negating to a large extent the argument of ruining streets. “YEAH, WE’RE GOING TO REPAIR THE HELL OUT OF YOUR STREETS! RAWRGH!”

Not to mention the goodwill of the people

Personally, I think it would have been very effective to simply remove rubber guards from snowplows and suspend all business requirements up to fair practice laws on private plowing firms to allow additional hands on the street. That would have cleared the roads. Go back and fix the reflectors during the road maintenance season, which is set to be the largest in years.

The other problem, and this is a big one, is that most citizens failed absolutely and miserably to keep up their sidewalks, both in their businesses and homes. That’s the one monumental problem. I think there would have been less an ordeal if the city had started fining folks for not doing their duty. The people don’t want to hear how bad they failed and how many potential injuries they could have caused. I also think any damages that occured on unshoveled sidewalk should be assessed to a large sum.

If it were me setting policy, I’d allow folks to turn in anonymous photos of unshoveled sidewalks to the city for fine purposes. That would get things fixed in a jiffy. Set the fine to something like $1,500 with a fixed due date.

People not working: I suppose for this to be reversed, you’d need fully plowed streets – complete with enough snowplows and drivers to plow every single street in Seattle in a day. I think we just beat Chicago. Then you’d also have to rebuild all of our streets to new standards that can accommodate a full steel-blade snowplow. Streets can no longer be mounded to remove rain, we will have to inset all of our manholes, and we’ll have to change out our reflector system for inset reflectors.

Getting to the hospital: See above. Or we make sure we have a few 4wd ambulances to get to snow-covered streets. Doctors made it to work fine in 4wd vehicles.

Charter buses driving down ice-covered hills: That was smart. It’s probably the city’s fault.

Purchasing salt: Not a terrible idea. But I think people assume salt will make streets as clear as I-5. I-5 was clear because of salt, frequent plowing, and the fact that there’s a car a second driving over the street. Without constant plowing using steel edges all the way to the surface (see above), we won’t have clear, ice-free streets.

I think you have to step back and think about how people expect to get around versus how they should get around in this situation. Using good bus policies (instead of driving articulated buses up hills) would have provided everyone a reasonable amount of mobility – enough to get to work. Providing a clear path for 2wd vehicles to go wherever they want is an unreasonable request.

It’s pretty clear that planning needs to come first: a post mortem (what happened, what did we do right, what did we do wrong), ideas for what needs to change, and a realistic look at whether the money is possibly there to do it.

Metro has faced huge shortfalls due to the oil spike this last year, and will likely see declining ridership due to the drop in prices at the pump coupled with the loss of thousands of jobs held by regular riders. SDOT can’t have any spare dollars, either.

Honestly, one thing that Metro should have done is to put employees out on the road in chained 4WD to every major intersection served and put up signs about service changes. Posting on the Web site doesn’t help people who don’t use the Web or don’t know to check it.

Global warming = really global climate change, which has already resulted in more extremes and freak weather in the last several years. We’re likely to see more snow like this in future years, even if on alternate years the Cascades are frighteningly dry.