A Winter's Tale That Melts Away

Resolved: The Washington area is pathetic when it comes to snow.

That is the topic we're debating today, although we aren't really debating it because I'm going to be pretty one-sided. I touched on this in a column last week but wanted to return to it after hearing from many readers.

The belief that Washington is worse than other parts of the country is based on a few suppositions. The first is that nobody is from around here. Because nobody is from around here, nobody knows how to drive in the snow.

Let's examine that: Is Washington full of outsiders? No. Just because you just got here doesn't mean that I just got here. In a recent Washington Post survey of 1,003 people in the metropolitan area, 18 percent of respondents said they have lived here for five years or less. Forty-three percent have lived here for 26 years or more. The average length of time a respondent had lived here was 24.4 years. That's plenty long enough to learn the intricacies of driving in our weather.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that it is true that Washington is full of people from elsewhere. Doesn't it stand to reason that "elsewhere" should include about as many people from where it snows as from where it doesn't?

Yet you rarely hear someone say, "Boy, when it snows I'm just useless! I'm a hazard!" No. It's always that everybody else can't drive in the snow. They're from somewhere else, and they're the problem.

Then there's the argument that we cancel school too quickly. Reader Gilbert Johnson of Bethesda said he grew up in rural Michigan. The snowstorms that shut area schools last week "would have passed with barely a notice" there, he wrote. "Schools would have remained open with no drop in attendance. Working people would have gone about their normal activities."

But a rural place is not the same as an urban place. As Candace Haaga from Rockville wrote: "In Colorado when I grew up, when the winter got bad, everyone had snow tires or chains, and we did close the schools about once a year. . . . We had a total of four high schools in my town, and that was the entire school district. We all lived in the same weather zone, about 15 minutes from school for everyone, and no one waited for a bus at 7 a.m."

Contrast that with Montgomery and Fairfax counties, where five kids at one bus stop may go to five different schools, where magnet buses and activity buses crisscross suburbia.

Rosy memories of a past where children tromped through shoulder-high drifts are just that: memories. Even if they are true, 2005 is different from 1975. We did a lot of things back then that we don't do now: smoked cigarettes at our desks, hitchhiked . . .

Bernard Katz of Reston once worked for the National Park Service in Colorado's Mesa Verde. "Where I was, the roads were not as crowded [as in Washington] and if you slipped and slithered you wouldn't hit three cars to the left of you and four cars parked on the other side."

That gets to the argument made by Carey Armstrong, who lives in Arlington and works near Columbia. Carey says the real reason we're so paranoid about snow has nothing to do with our driving ability or lack thereof. "It has to do with the fact that traffic here -- given traffic volume versus road system capacity -- is continually teetering on the razor edge of disaster anyway, even under ideal weather conditions. It doesn't take much to push a badly overstressed road/highway system over the edge."

Exactly. All it takes is one driver to break wind on the Dulles Toll Road and it's brake lights as far as the eye can see. Why should some of us hope that things would be no worse in the snow?

Then there's the belief that our various public works departments should be able to handle whatever nature throws at them.