RHBNCA

[SILV3R]

in fact, it's positively chucking the stuff down. i was going to be off work anyway today because of strange fluey symptoms, but i'm not sure i could have got in to the office without walking the 4 1/2 miles. there's no buses and no tubes. not sure i fancy that journey a whole lot.

[claire]

i walked to work this morning (fortuantely i don't live too far away) however, i got in, and there was no one else there and then saw the department email saying pretty much everyone was working from home. so i turned round and wlaked back home again.
brr

and its just started snowing again bah humbug

[SILV3R]

it's jus a little embarrasing that a few inches of snow can bring the nation to a halt. we may have not had snow like this for 18 years or so, but placese like russia, canada and almost all of scandawegia suffer from this every year and manage perfectly well.

oh, and, man does great job at pretending he didn't just fill his pants.

[claire]

i know its crazy - there's what? 6 inches at the moment, and all the buses and tubes stop service! mind you, i wouldn't want to have to deal with the snow on a regular basis.
our office has been officially closed now, and we have a webpage to check in the morning to see if we should stay home or make it into work. forcast for another blizzard this afternoon, so wonder what tommorow will be like!

[just_juice_it]

Its amazing how much snow has actually fallen. I had a friend over to visit me this weekend and she's still in my flat waiting for a flight to take off. She's moved from Easyjet to BA and is now waiting for any airline that can get her back to london before tomorrow. Its crazy how the UK cannot handle the snowfall - we had more snow at the start of january in Germany and everyone continued working and living like nothing had happened.

[Joey]

I've said it once and I'll say it again... I hate the snow!! Fucksocks!!

[claire]

wot he said ^^

am glad i'm not alone in my dislike of snow

[Psymon]

whoooooo, love it! we've got almost two foot

[themadone]

I'm loving it! I went out at lunch time and built a snow bear

[OrbitalPete]

I don't get why people are surprised the country can't handle this kind of weather, and go on to compare it to other countries saying 'such and such deal with this all the time'.

That's exactly the point. The local services, emergency services and more importantly the public are ALL used to it.

We simply don't have the capacity to grit all our roads continuously. The reason we have to grit is because
a) the tarmac laid down in this country is primarily designed for wet/dry conditions in 0-20 degree heat.
b) drivers in this country are not used to driving on ice
c) no-one has snow-chains for their vehicles

The reason we don't have the capacity to grit all our roads is simply that this is exceptional weather and permanently keeping and maintaining a massive active gritting force would be financially insane.

If you go and put hot summer sun (which we cope with fine in the UK) on Canadian roads you'll find transport chaos as their tarmac melts. That is, you would if traffic density was anything like it is here. What we essentially have is a transport network that twice a day operates at over-capacity. If you complicate that with extreme weather, things are certainly going to wrong. This isn't helped by people driving like idiots.

We live on a very quiet back road. We've had 3 cars go passed the house today that I've seen. ALL of them were fishtailing over the road, with one of them bouncing off the kerbs several times. Now multiply that up to a main road where people are used to driving at 60+ miles an hour and don't understand the concept of adjusting their speed to the conditions. You only have to look at the number of accidents on the roads today to see that regardless of having less traffic on the roads we're simply not equipped for these conditions.

The same principles can be applied to our bus and rail networks.

[Psymon]

^^I agree with all of that^^

[metatim]

I took some photos on my walk to work:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2 ... =200901338

I'm in agreement with OP, and was impressed to hear Boris Johnson laying down this argument in a very simple way - something about it being a waste of tax-payer's money to have an army of snow-ploughs that are only needed once every twenty years.

That's the real comparison - how well do other countries handle it when they are hit by once-in-twenty-years weather. Or replace twenty by x and find the maximum for each country. Hmmm.

[SILV3R]

i'm afraid i'm not in agreement. yes, we aren't prepared for this and yes spending shitloads of money just in case is ridiculous.

this does not explain buses not running in the slightest. certainly not in the middle of london. the weather was forecast and the main roads were gritted. taking my journey to work as an example, finchley road, baker street and the euston road were all gritted today. so why couldn't a bus drive down them? there are bus lanes the entire journey and they were clear because the respective local councils paid attention to the forecasts and did exactly the right thing. and the bus depot is just down the (wet, not icy or snowy) road from me. this was just poor.

maybe not all the drivers could get to work, but some of them could. it was only 1 in 5 people who stayed home today. and there were far worse areas hit than mine.

my wife did go into the office this morning. other than the road i live on, the entire way was simply wet roads. she had no trouble. admittedly the rest of the staff at her place didn't make it in, but considering some of them only live a mile away, i suspect there were a few liberties being taken. she was back home within the hour.

i can understand the tubes being shut: most trains start from overground positions and points were freezing. does beg the question why something hasn't been done about that before as cold weather happens every year. in fact, it's been colder in the last few months. i can understand runways being shut, but only for visibility reasons (please see misjudged cypriot parking). runways are made of material designed to take not only extreme temperatures, but also extreme physical pressure (even the paint is!). shouldn't places like heathrow be geared up for this sort of thing a little better? why no underground heating and sufficient drainage systems?

If you go and put hot summer sun (which we cope with fine in the UK) on Canadian roads you'll find transport chaos as their tarmac melts.

saskatchewan manages this every year and it has some of the greatest annual temperature variations of any populated area.

yes, people shouldn't have been driving today, but buses at the very least should have been. the drivers of those things should be trained well enough to know to slow down when there is a bit of slush. i understand entirely why this would effect villages and towns, but major arteries into london should have been dealt with and therefore be fine for public transport.

I'm in agreement with OP, and was impressed to hear Boris Johnson laying down this argument in a very simple way - something about it being a waste of tax-payer's money to have an army of snow-ploughs that are only needed once every twenty years.

as mentioned, i agree with the cost issues (although i can see an argument for the services to be put in place as well[/url]. boris' speech was ludicrous for the most part. if we skip the attempted "right type of snow..." joke, his statement that many of the tube lines were running was plain wrong. waterloo and city line was working, but how the hell are you meant to get to the two stop joke line? the dlr was running, although not to all stations and not a scheduled service. it's one advantage being that they don't have drivers. there was no other line that wasn't cancelled or running a massively reduced service.

today was an embarrasment for london.

[OrbitalPete]

Thing is silv - simple hot and cold are not the issues here. It's the fact that it's snow. (and I'll grant you that the Canada example was a bad one)

If snow gets into train points it gets compressed into an ice block. That results in the points not closing. So each set of points has to be cleaned and monitored throughout the snow fall.

As far as airports go - again, snow creates more isues that simple cold. To the best of my knowledge Heathrow has heated runways, and it is not actally the runways which cause the problems. You also would also need to keep the entire apron clear. To quote the Guardian:

"At Heathrow the airport's full snow operation, consisting of 58 snow cutters, ploughs and de-icers, worked around the clock from 3pm on Sunday to clear the snow and ice. But even that effort could not stop a Cyprus Airways flight slipping off the taxiway, lodging its front wheel in a grassy area yesterday."

If you suggest putting underfloor heating into a couple of thousand acres of concrete I think you can imagine the response from both environmentalists and shareholders - let alone the months of restrictions it would place on the airport for months while these retrofit works were done - better to suck up the occasional day here and there.

With buses the problem is even worse - they're just as vulnerable to ice as other vehicles, except that you also have a load of people on them, and they're not as maneouverable. The high mass means if they start to slip, you can't stop them until they hit something. Salting doesn't necessarily help either - you melt the snow, but with the volume of snow yesterday you soon enough reach a point where the snow melts sufficiently to dilute the salt to a point where the water can now re-freeze as black ice.


There is also the point here that the transport agency recommended that no one travel unles it is essential. Essential travel, to me at least, does not include going to the office. The British 'not going to get stopped by a couple of inches of snow' is stupid. When the people in charge of the roads are recommending you don't travel, don't travel. If people are being told not to drive, how can you then justify sending out bus drivers? 'All the cool kids are doing it! Oh, and there's going to be loads more people than usual. And none of the side streets have been gritted'.

Everyone seems to ignore the Highways Agency when they give this kind of recommendation then act surprised when "there have been too many minor accidents on the roads to put a number on". Just go on YouTube, search for 'car crash snow' and my guess is you'll see hundreds from yesterday of sub-5mph crashes. If you can't control a vehicle at that speed is it really sensible to go onto main roads?

[SILV3R]

you seem to have missed my point. there was no snow on the roads to my office. nor between the bus depot and my bus stop. if the fear was that there may be ice, then they shouldn't have been driving at all whenever the temperature is sufficiently low enough.

i'm not for one second suggesting that everyone was playing truant yesterday, but it seems to have been used as an excuse for a day of jollies by a lot of people. and a blanket decision to not have any buses working was badly thought out and ridiculous.

as for this morning, i nearly killed a bus driver when he said the bus was being held at a stop "to regulate the service." i settled for pointing out that he was already a day late.

[OrbitalPete]

if the fear was that there may be ice, then they shouldn't have been driving at all whenever the temperature is sufficiently low enough.

It's not whether there *may* be ice, it's that there was ice. Having an ice free route yesterday puts you in a small minority. Claiming that buses shouldn't run in all freezing temperatures is missing the point. Sub zero temperatures don't make ice - sustained precipitation in sub zero temperatures does. That's what we've just had. Lots of it. The most for 20 years. I don't think it's unreasonable to cancel bus services in those conditions. What was the rest of the buses route like? Perhaps more significantly if a bus has an accident who carries liability? When you over-crowd buses on an icy road how much more risk are you putting people at?

People have been drawing the ridiculous comparison of the blitz, pointing out that bombs didn't stop buses running. Comparing a situation where everyone is at equal risk regardless of what they are doing or where they are, to a situation where services are stopped because our infrastructure is simply not built to cope with a situation which directly effects the service is meaningless.

Again; this stiff upper-lip " how could we possibly be stopped by 6" of frozen rain" totally misses the point that our infrastructure - entirely reasonably - is simply not equipped for these kind of events. Individuals can cope absolutely fine, but you cannot expect normal services to survive when they struggle to operate at maximum capacity in ideal conditions.

Yes, you could run buses up and down the clear stretches, and maybe they should look at that in the future. However, I can understand that when your sever weather warning arrives on a Sunday night that getting that kind of thing arranged for the monday morning doesn't happen.

[just_juice_it]

I'm agreeing with Silv on this one.

With regards to the buses, i think that although you make some very decent points, in Germany not only did the buses run but they were far more popular in the bad weather conditions. We have bendy buses (so double the length) and not only did they stay on the road and have no problems with it (my work is located in the middle of nowhere so its not a matter of the roads being gritted etc), but they also dealt with a higher number of passengers. I find it amazing that London came to a standstill yesterday.

I think that all cars should be required by law to have winter tyres and i think that it should also be a requirement that before your test you should have to go through all weather training.

The weather warning arrived on Friday night and it wasnt until sunday that people started to take it seriously.

[OrbitalPete]

I think that all cars should be required by law to have winter tyres and i think that it should also be a requirement that before your test you should have to go through all weather training.

And if you'd proposed that 7 days ago people would have laughed at you for proposing such a useless and expensive scheme. In the 12 years I've been driving I can think of 3 days where I would have benefitted from winter tyes. In 2 of those cases what I actually would have wanted was ice spikes, but only for part of the journey (they would have been ruined in the other part which was normal gritted driving conditions). Even if people HAD winter tyres etc, how many people do you think would actually bother changing their tyres for one or two days use?

The vast majority of the time it's simply not necessary. This is a freak event for the UK, no surprise things went wrong. And again, comparing this to germany where weather like this is far more common is meaningless - our problem is not that councils don't understand what's needed - it's that there aren't the resources to cope with these situations, and the general public is not competant in extreme weather. You can try trainging them but when those kind of skills go unused for years, they get forgotten. So it's ultimately an ineffective and expensive way of achieving very little.

[SILV3R]

you cannot expect normal services to survive when they struggle to operate at maximum capacity in ideal conditions.

and here may be the exact problem with the whole service.

[OrbitalPete]

No-ones going to claim our public transport systems are fit for purpose