If I've said this once, I've said it a hundred times. There are two main reasons that Seattle shuts down when it snows. The first is that snow is rare enough that 90% of the drivers don't know how to deal with it. As my friend originally from Minnesota says, it's not driving in snow she's afraid of, it's driving in snow with Seattle drivers. The other reason is that Seattle has lots of hills. Everywhere. It's not that unusual within the city limits to have an elevation change of several hundred feet in a mile or so.
A couple of other reasons have occurred to me, too. Seattle public transportation is awful. People can't easily get out of their cars and onto a bus or train. And most places the average person needs to visit in a day aren't within walking distance. In New York you can hop on the subway and not be held up by a traffic jam caused by the guy in the SUV who thought he could stop on a steep hill covered in ice. In Seattle, the buses are caught in the jams like everybody else.
We also have an awful lot of elevated roadways. You know the kind, the ones that turn into ice cubes after a night like last night. Most of our major highways and arterials are elevated at some point along the way. That's what happens in a town with so many hills. That's why this morning when I checked the news I learned that three major roads were closed down, and the police were advising people to stay home until the sun had melted some of the ice.
And after a quick chat with a co-worker, it looks like I'm staying home today. The street in front of the store "is a sheet of ice" that is filled with so many idiots that my co-worker is tempted to "take a chair out and watch the show". Yeah, I think I'll stay home.
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