And were told to get bent
During the weird weather a few weeks back, the snow, the ice, both leading to horrible driving conditions, I reported the facts and did my best to lay off the WSDOT, even though their admin folks did a horrific job of keeping the roads passable.
Not exactly knowing what to expect, the WSDOT opened an email port for compliments and complaints. They got a good deal of both.
In the spirit of accessibility and openness, the state Department of Transportation, an agency not often noted for self-examination or soul-searching, recently invited motorists to comment on its performance late last month, when snows clogged the roads and half-hour commutes stretched into all-night endurance tests.
Predictably, Seattle-area drivers sharpened their knives.
“This is just another case of big government run amuck (sic) and showing their true colors of complete incompetence,” said one of nearly 80 anonymous posters on the department’s blog site. “We need a head on a plate for this.”
Then, being broad-minded, the commuters turned on one another.
Seattle was full of “entitlement-driven whiners,” said one poster. It was paralyzed by hand wringers “boo-hoo-hooing for weeks on end about how the ‘darn Gub Mint’ has let me down,” wrote another.
A woman named Susan blamed “people who think nothing bad should ever happen to them (and want to blame someone else when it does).”
While I never expect things to go as planned for me personally, I do expect that the people in charge of the roads will prepare to service the roads when we are given two fucking days notice of an incoming weather problem.
DOT Secretary Doug MacDonald took a philosophical approach to the criticism, absorbing the slings, shrugging off the most vicious attacks and expressing appreciation for those commuters who offered suggestions.
Some, he said, might be worth serious consideration.
“Drivers just expect that everything will always go smoothly for them, and that won’t always be the case,” he said. “It’s pretty clear that with a storm of that kind, we aren’t equipped. If we get 4 inches pounding down in commute hours, we are going to have a problem. That’s a fact. All the equipment we had available was out there.”
Oh yeah, it was out there. On fucking Snoqualmie Pass. The trucks had been on Snoqualmie Pass since the Thanksgiving weekend, where they had been making a damn fine effort to make sure that folks could get from one side of the state to the other during the holiday.
Unfortunately for urban and suburban folks, they apparently never listened to a weather report after that Monday. Otherwise, they would have known to bring the trucks down to where the people were going to be driving.
While I DO work in the “transportation industry†I do not work for the state or any other government agency. It seems my ability to read a weather report would prove too useful.
There are no plans for bolstering the fleet, he said, but the department might consider prepositioning plows at strategic points or using smaller trucks to drive the shoulders of otherwise impassable roads — both solutions proposed by blog posters, he said.
Ooooh? What was that? Did he say something about pre-positioning vehicles? I couldn’t tell as I suddenly went fucking blind there for a minute.
Now I’m just waiting for the King County Metro Board on Public Transportation to open up an email line so that the folks they stranded downtown in the snow when they shut off bus service after the football game can speak their minds.
Oh wait, KingCo never listens to criticism.
Around here, the police supervisors order their patrol officers to limit their driving during icy weather. All of us had had the Skid Car course, usually several times as it was recurring training.
Were I a Sergeant, a rank I did not attain because of thinking like this, I would have ordered my officers out to cite at least 10 bonehead drivers per shift on these icy days. Drivers who drive 50 miles per hour on ice and can’t stop and have a crash. Drivers who fail to use and carry chains and get stuck, blocking roads so more get stuck. Most of this work could be done on foot at one intersection, so the officers wouldn’t be driving alongside the bonehead drivers very much.
Then, were I Chief of Police, I would personally visit the Presiding Judge of Traffic Court and encourage said jurist to throw the book at those found guilty of those infractions.
Maybe getting whacked with a $500 fine for sliding though a red light and bouncing off another car which had the right of way might give these chumps pause to think about how they drive in inclement weather.
Another possibility would be for the State to pass a law restricting the right to drive in icy weather to those in properly equipped vehicles WHO HAVE TAKEN SKID-CONTROL TRAINING AND CAN PROVE IT.
Driving on glare ice or a polished snow pack is such an order of magnitude of skill higher than normal-traction driving that it makes no sense to blanket it in with normal driving.
Just as flying on instruments is such a more difficult skill for pilots to learn that they must have 5 times as many hours of training in it than they do to get a fair-weather flying license, ice driving should be regulated.