This week’s snow storm in South England happens about once every 18 years. It’s expected to drop up to 8 inches, and currently it’s bringing London to its knees. Interestingly, they seem cheerful about it. During our once every 18 or 20 years snow storm, it brought Seattle to our knees but the grousing when on for weeks. Snow certainly did not bring out the best in us. If London can handle a brief shutdown due to snow and be happy, can’t we?
London’s one of my favorite cities. Here are a few nice shots of a snow-covered London.
Two differences.
1) This storm hasn’t shut them down for weeks
2) They’re stuck in London. We’re stuck in Seattle.
What’s with the Seattle-hating? I had a blast in Seattle with the snow.
Anyway, they’ve been down since Sunday, and it’s Thursday night there now.
Ah, so I consider myself a total Seattleite, but on this one I too will fault Seattle. And I’ve spent an extended amount of time in England on a few occasions so I feel I can comment a bit on the British response too.
I’d put the two major differences as:
1) The Brits are more cheerful and easygoing while the average Seattleite is more of an uptight whiner.
2) The Brits are more self reliant while the average Seattleite expects the government to solve all problems for them.
I actually unloaded on one Seattleite at my local watering hole for his snow related whining. Why did I unload on him but not unload on the other Seattleites who were doing the same thing?
Well this particular Seattleite is also some odd flavor of Libertarian. The normal target for his whining is government: Government should be smaller and tax less, services should be paid for by user fees and not taxes, infrastructure should be built by private enterprise and not the government, people should handle their own problems, etc, etc, etc.
So sitting there listening to him whine about Mayor Nickels and the city government’s poor response to the snow storm and how he was inconvenienced was a bit much for me. It turns out that this particular Seattleite doesn’t own a snow shovel, didn’t try to borrow one, and didn’t think to maybe hire a kid to do a little shoveling for him. Oh, and when he works he works from home so he doesn’t have to go anywhere anyhow. Libertarian? No, just a whiner.
But I liked the snow. I thought it was great, although it is unfortunate for some of our retailers that it came right before Christmas. I guess you can blame some diety somewhere for that.
As a British expat living in Seattle, I seriously question both of your numbered assertions. The only places I’ve known worse groups of whiners than London (where I grew up) were the smaller towns in Britain I lived in as an adult.
Max’s first point cuts to the chase: I recall very little whining for the first couple of days Seattle was shut down, but it built up over the course of a week or so. London has not had to deal with a 2-week period of infrastructure being consistently well below normal operating levels in my lifetime.
I agree with the lazy and unwilling attitude. I had several employees who didn’t even try to clear off their drives and get out. The few who I knew were truly unable to get in (one gal lives on a steep road that was very icy and has a bum leg) I actually went and picked up. But in this economy, what kind of idiot lets an entire day of wages go by when you can get a neighborhood teen to shovel for you for $30?
Difference may be that in Seattle, we could see, visibly, every day, that the emergency response effort was goofy. We knew the system was failing, even as public officials were telling us otherwise.
No citizen or group of citizens is ever going to be satisfied when the BS factory is going full throttle. And be it ever thus, we should hope.
London’s response hasn’t been the best, either, so trying to skew this as something less-than-applicable is silly.
Not everyone is as unhappy as you’d like them to be.
London’s response has been glamourised by their media – smiling faces sledging on Primrose Hill, dogs romping in parks. However, as the photo at the top shows, transportation came to a halt for 2-3 days (not 10 as in Seattle, and yes there are hills), most trains and all buses in their garages. Things were mostly back to normal this morning.
Man, I always thought it would be a nightmare to drive one of those articulated buses in the snow. It’d be even worse sliding sideways in a double decker, at least for the people on the top!
By the way, Nickels get’s accused of being ultra-left, and he probably is, but that is a difference with London. Red Ken lost the last election, the new mayor, Boris Johnson, is a Conservative! Also, London is much bigger, if you count all the boroughs of Greater Metropolitan London, the CITY OF LONDON, is just one of those boroughs, and it is quite small.
By the way, even the Canadians have had their troubles this year, but Toronto is trying to avoid having to call in the Army, like they did in 1999.
I think you’re right about this. The suburbs LOVE to hate Nickels, and the media is mostly written by suburban folk, so there you go.
That is so true. Although one such suburbanite, former Ballard resident Dori Monson, linked Light Rail to Ron Sims, Nickels will be chair at the opening.
Now here is an interesting piece of snow removal equipment that if Nickels bought a few, I am sure some of those same suburbanites in the media would accuse him of wasting money.
http://www.snowdragonmelters.com/
Now as for LONDON, wonder if the Chunnel trains were affected by heavy snow as well, although the Channel Tunnel has had problems over the past few months, but because of a different problem. A fire on a truck in the tunnel.
(surprised nobody’s brought this up)
Real differences between London and Seattle:
1) Rail vs. Buses
2) Density vs. Sprawl (ok, not for US standards, but compared to London?)
But if you look at the picture, most of the tube lines were out.
There are a total of 11 Tube Lines plus Docklands Light Railway, over 800 bus routes run by more than 7000 buses, all carrying about a billion passengers a year. Much of the system ground to a halt Sunday night, Monday and into Tuesday – it cannot have been joyous for anyone wanting or needing rail OR bus transport.
Oops. I had assumed since there was no snow on the tracks in the picture, a train coming with lights on, and people standing at the station that rail kept working.
I was kind of shocked when I heard on the BBC World Service that all London bus service was suspended. Their buses carry six million people every day.
Hey now, that first picture of the tube outages is a little misleading. The Victoria line was chugging along just fine on the 2nd. And most of the partially closed or suspended lines were just affected on the non-underground portions. Things in general got back up and running pretty quickly… not the total white out like you all had in the northwest.
Still, traveling around could be hectic for those days, especially considering that sidewalk shoveling does not seem to be a familiar concept for Londoners… basically turning some paths into icy death traps.
The Victoria line is completely underground – like Montreal’s Metro, there are no portions of the line which run above ground.
Except for the depot, which is above ground but that’s a tiny part.
Maybe it’s because the socialism in England makes it harder for people to get fired because the snow prevented them from getting to work? I’m not up to speed on all the details of the British laws, but I recall it’s almost impossibly difficult to fire an employee in France. (And yes, I know that not all European countries all the same.) If you’re not worried about loosing your job because of circumstances you can’t control, then maybe you’d complain less too.
Actually the UK has basically the same economic model as the US (in fact it’s often referred to as “Anglo-American economics”), with some exceptions like the National Health Service. In the current economic crisis, this Newsweek headline says it all: The Last Model Standing Is France. Not too many people would have said that during the bubble, though, all they noticed was the slower growth of the French economy. It’s all 20/20 hindsight.
They did a lot of privatizations in Britain, including British Rail, and public transport just about everywhere except for a handful of municipalities, and those have competition. London is exempt from the deregulated and privatized system, but even Red Ken at least put them out to private operators through competitive tender, and if a company failed, they had a shadow company of their own to take over those routes. Reading, Cardiff, and Edinburgh have the few surviving municipal owned companies, but they are run arms-length from the local councils, and consequently, not too accountable. Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands were also exempt. Here is a link to an article that has an interesting critique of what happened after the Thatcher era law took effect.
http://www.citytransport.info/Buses01.htm#Con
Unreated but – Andrew – in reference to your upcoming trip to Japan. In today’s NYT…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06japan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
Seems Japan is regretting some of the roads and bridges they built, but don’t mention transit.
Let’s just wait and see how cheerful and self-reliant the Londoners are halfway through week 2 of not being able to leave their homes.
Londoners have been through tougher times; for one thing, the city got bombed by the Germans during World War II, with huge sections left in ruins, so much more horrible than snow. There’s also the famous phrase “Keep calm and carry on.”
That’s true, and remember during the Blitz what passed for shelters, the Underground.