It is more than that. There is a difference between the snow in places like Iowa and snow in places like Seattle or the UK. In Iowa the temperature stays very cold all day throughout the snowfall season. The snow falls and stays frozen as flakes. In places like Seattle the temperature during a snowfall usually hovers right around the freezing point. The snow falls and then melts and then refreezes as ice then melts again then freezes again… The snow turns to ice which is a problem you don’t have in Iowa.
Areas like Seattle and the UK also don’t have a lot of snow clearing equipment that places like Iowa and Minnesota have. Around the Seattle area they are lucky to be able to clear the major roads because they don’t have enough plows and sanding trucks to clear more roads. The less traveled roads get minimal or no attention. So you end up in a problem where the residential roads where people live are all a mess while the major roads are all clear. How do you get to those major roads if the feeder roads are all slick and risky to drive? Ah, the fun of what those of you in Iowa would consider a minor snowfall.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever lived in Iowa before, but that simply isn’t the case. There’s always the Iowa saying (and I’m sure we stole it from somewhere else) that if you don’t like the weather just wait 5 minutes. Especially this time of year our snows usually start as rain then freeze to ice and snow as the day goes on and into night. This makes powder snow over ice, which is deadly. Then we have 1-2 days of thaw followed by heavy snow followed by thaw etc etc until you have good hard packed inch thick ice everwhere. Later in the year the snow/ice cycle calms down but never gets that good. People just learn to drive on it. We get our fluffy snow storms too, but I’d say it’s about 1:1 fluffy snow storms to crazy sleet/hail/snow/death snowstorms. The last two we just had that I was refering to were the sleet type. (the kind where you have to chip your car door open with an ice pick because of the 1/2 inch thick casing of ice over everything)`
That’s a good point, but it depends on the city. We had a big snow today and they won’t get to most of our side roads until tomorrow if they get to 'em at all. They figure it’s a losing battle I guess. Ames is pretty crappy for snow removal. Just because we have the equipment doesn’t mean they use it, I guess. Residential roads certainly never get sanded. I’m sure the larger volume of traffic in the seatle area make it alot worse though.
You get to the main roads by fishtailing and doing donuts all over the feeder roads until you get there. It helps to carry sand and a shovel in your car just in case.
I really think the main difference is that we are more used to it. Same basic conditions, but where it’s rarer for you guys, it’s 4-6 months out of the year for us. The general pastime for highschool boys in the winter it go out and play in the snow with their cars. By the time we had one winter of being a 16 year old screwing around in the snow every day under our belts we could pretty much handle anything. (those of us that still had cars left, of course)
Midwest winters are small part of why I’m moving to the Portland area next summmer. I’m tired of 'em.
//edit: It’s a two day door, of course. Hardly anyone in frickin’ Iowa knows how to properly drive on the highway or interstate, and they certainly don’t know how to merge correctly. It’s all what you’re used to.
I have to go with Seager’s theory in this case. Black Ice can happen almost anywhere. It was omnipresent in the winters of my adolescence in upstate New York, and pretty frequent in Utah as well when I lived there. The big difference between Seattle and Syracuse in the winter months is that once the ice formed on the roads in SYR, it was likely to stay for several days or longer. That being the case, JC is right on about the whole plowing/sanding infrastructure. Seattle has nothing. Syracuse could sand the world on 2 hours notice.
But back to Seager’s point…it’s all about practice time. We had lots of opportunity to practice. When I was in high school, anyone taking Driver’s Ed in the wintertime was guaranteed some fun, because the class would go out to the back parking lot and practice doughnuts and controlled sliding. We thought it was playtime, but it was building some important life skills. On a partly related note, this point was driven home to me when I first moved to Utah after high school. I thought I was an expert skier, but the first times I went up in the Utah mountains on powder days, I was falling right and left and the locals were kicking my tail. I had never skiied deep powder before, and didn’t have the technique. I was pretty discouraged until one day I went up after it had been really warm the day before, then frozen overnight. The mountain was an ocean of ice. The locals were floundering, but I owned the place along with a few others that were skiing successfully. When I chatted with a couple of the others I saw that were doing okay, we turned out to have one thing in common: high school in the northeast.
As unicyclists we should know this truth: you get good at what you practice.
I must have had Iowa confused with Canada.
I bicycled through Iowa in the Summer and got to enjoy one of your pouring rain storms. The type of rain that doesn’t happen in Seattle. The type of pouring rain where there is standing water on the road because it can’t drain off fast enough. They say it rains in Seattle, but it don’t rain like that. Needless to say I got really wet on the bike that day.
I have a set of chains in the car that I have never had to use in 5 years. I keep them in the car during the Winter just in case, but I have never needed to use them yet (I don’t ski so I tend to stay in the low lands during the Winter). The chains are still in brand new condition.
We have a few idiots who can’t merge here also. My pet peeve is getting stuck behind someone on the onramp who accelerates up to 40 mph to merge on the freeway that has traffic going 60 or 70. Step on the damn gas. You’re going to get me rear ended. I had the bad luck of being behind someone on the onramp trying to merge that way today. But for the most part people in Oregon and Washington handle the highway driving better than other areas of the country I’ve driven through.
I did a cross-country bike ride in '91. We sort of ended up following part of the RAGBRAI route that year but the RAGBRAI was about a week ahead of us.
I was really hoping that there was not going to be any lightening. That would have been dangerous. Thankfully there was no lightening, just lots and lots and lots of rain.
There’s always the Iowa saying (and I’m sure we stole it from somewhere else) that if you don’t like the weather just wait 5 minutes. Especially this time of year our snows usually start as rain then freeze to ice and snow as the day goes on and into night. This makes powder snow over ice, which is deadly. Then we have 1-2 days of thaw followed by heavy snow followed by thaw etc etc until you have good hard packed inch thick ice everwhere. Later in the year the snow/ice cycle calms down but never gets that good. People just learn to drive on it. We get our fluffy snow storms too, but I’d say it’s about 1:1 fluffy snow storms to crazy sleet/hail/snow/death snowstorms. The last two we just had that I was refering to were the sleet type. (the kind where you have to chip your car door open with an ice pick because of the 1/2 inch thick casing of ice over everything)`