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y'all are missing the point - this would not and could not happen in a city with a good tight, dense grid, with plentiful options both on the road and with transit. Atlanta turned a non-event into a significant disaster.
You under estimate the amount of effort it takes to keep roads clear or how badly ICE and Snow can effect traffic. In terms of transit anything that effects cars effects busses and trains don't run everywhere and you need to walk home at some point risking injury. In terms of roads 2 inches of snow will drop the speed that you can safely travel to under 30MPH and I have crawled in traffic at speeds of like 20MPH or less due to snow not being cleared. Snow effects the traction of the car which can you to slide and have accidents and ICE forget about it safe travel with ice is darned near impossible.
A grid can handle more traffic more easily than sprawl but no grid is going to save you when the roads themselves are not safe to travel on.
y'all are missing the point - this would not and could not happen in a city with a good tight, dense grid, with plentiful options both on the road and with transit. Atlanta turned a non-event into a significant disaster.
wrong. Even with a dense city and plentiful options, it could happen:
Quote:
Originally Posted by nei
Here's what happened to London after a snowstorm. It's not very sprawly at all, and its public transit is far less limited than Atlanta's. Arguably less limited than any American one. And snow is about as familiar to London as Atlanta.
Just about all buses canceled. Some subway lines shutdown. Rail lines suffered large delays, though it still run. For those driving, there were "too many incidents to count". A highway, M25, had a 32 mile traffic jam.
y'all are missing the point - this would not and could not happen in a city with a good tight, dense grid, with plentiful options both on the road and with transit. Atlanta turned a non-event into a significant disaster.
No you're missing the point. You are taking a correlation and making it a causation. This is what you are saying:
- Atlanta was shut down by snow.
- There is a lot of sprawl in Atlanta.
- Therefore, Atlanta's sprawl is the reason the snow was so disastrous.
Completely leaving out ANY other possibility for why Atlanta's road system was shut down by ice. A grid wouldn't have worked either if the roads weren't clear. Buses can't run on iced roads. Rail would have also been affected. And if almost every single person was sent home (schools, work, transit workers) at the same time there are gonna be issues. The severe winter storm precautions are more to blame.
Yes, the sprawl in Atlanta is pretty bad. We all know that. That doesn't automatically make it the reason that the city was paralyzed.
Dallas has been hit by a somewhat severe ice storm in the past. It is also sprawled. Nothing of this magnitude happened there. So sprawl can't be the main reason. What are the differences between Dallas and Atlanta? One of those differences was probably a much larger contributor to the shutdown than sprawl. If anything, sprawl added to the issue, but it definitely wasn't the cause.
The ice vs snow issue completely misses the point. it was a minor weather event - ice or no, nothing like this would ever happen in a city that had a resilient network of streets. Atlanta suffered a complete paralysis that stretched into two days. Ice, snow, whatever, does not matter. If one road gets shut down in a networked city there are options - in Atlanta heart attack.
Ice is a red herring thrown out by road warriors to wedded to their own delusions to question whether they are real.
Ignorance must be blissful.
Ice is never a "minor weather event." I have seen a quarter inch of ice decimate Maine forests. I have also heard about the ice storm that took down an entire electrical transmission line in Quebec. Icing on surfaces is serious business.
The ice vs snow issue completely misses the point. it was a minor weather event - ice or no, nothing like this would ever happen in a city that had a resilient network of streets.
No you're missing the point. You are taking a correlation and making it a causation. This is what you are saying:
- Atlanta was shut down by snow.
- There is a lot of sprawl in Atlanta.
- Therefore, Atlanta's sprawl is the reason the snow was so disastrous.
Completely leaving out ANY other possibility for why Atlanta's road system was shut down by ice. A grid wouldn't have worked either if the roads weren't clear. Buses can't run on iced roads. Rail would have also been affected. And if almost every single person was sent home (schools, work, transit workers) at the same time there are gonna be issues. The severe winter storm precautions are more to blame.
Yes, the sprawl in Atlanta is pretty bad. We all know that. That doesn't automatically make it the reason that the city was paralyzed.
Dallas has been hit by a somewhat severe ice storm in the past. It is also sprawled. Nothing of this magnitude happened there. So sprawl can't be the main reason. What are the differences between Dallas and Atlanta? One of those differences was probably a much larger contributor to the shutdown than sprawl. If anything, sprawl added to the issue, but it definitely wasn't the cause.
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Sprawl did not cause this issue otherwise it would happen every day irrespective of ice and/or snow. All the OP managed to do with this entire 22 page thread is:
(1) Insult the intelligence of anyone who has lived through at least one ice storm.
(2) Show off some poor reasoning skills.
You've ventured out of your knowledge zone and need to quit. Damn near every city below the Mason-Dixon line will shut down for a day, likely two, with the storm Atlanta got.
A quarter inch of ice, below freezing temperatures with no solar warming and no treatment equals gridlock-on the major roads, on the secondary roads, on the rails.
That's a good way to put it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohiogirl81
Times have changed. Anyway, no doubt at least some of those kids being picked up by their parents were in eighth grade or younger, just like you ...
Agreed! 3/4 of the school kids are in 8th grade or below.
uh ICE on the ground is never a minor weather event
I wonder what the OP would think of this: A quarter of inch of ice in the Philadelphia area this morning has pretty much shut down the entire region. The commuter rail system had delays and cancellations, and New Jersey Transit and Amtrak had stopped running. Bus routes were suspended because the buses cannot climb the hills on those routes. Schools and businesses were closed all over the place.
Be that as it may, any kind of frozen precipitation in Atlanta is not minor.
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