I side with the poll responders. Took me an hour to get from Hillsboro to downtown Pdx via Hwy 26, and then once downtown I couldn't get back out. Got my car stuck on a hill in Goose Hollow and had to leave it there for the night, take the MAX home and come back in the morning.

It's not the snow, though, it's the ice. We got snow, then it melted a little, rained a little, and then refroze - that hill in Goose Hollow was just an ice rink. Chains might have helped, but not snow tires or 4-wheel drive. Even salting the roads takes a while, and by midnight it was all melted anyway. I don't blame the city's DOT or other drivers, it was just a thing...

The city is unequipped to deal with snow. We learn this EVERY YEAR, but they do not.
Then the driving sucks and whining ensues.
It's easy: dump truck+plow+sand

Here's a hint to Trimet. When it's snowing, and there's 2 inches of snow on the ground, try putting your buses onto their designated snow routes. That way, you wouldn't end up with three buses stuck on NE 15th below Alberta.

Then again, I know several people who took 5 hours or more to get home last night, so I got off lightly.

The Max was about the only thing that was running well for half the evening. Score one for rail over buses.

@D When? They should put down salt and sand ahead of time? But none of the weathermen expected it to snow yesterday. And how much does that cost? A couple hundred thousand? More? Are you going to pay for it?

The snow was bad at 5 p.m - and then gone by midnight. What good would sanding and plowing do, in that case? It'd take more than that just to plow and sand all the major streets!

Quit whining - this is real life. They can't wave a magic wand and make it not snow on you, and if it does that can't make it go away in three hours.

The snow was coming down heaviest from 3-6 pm, so yeah, smirk, it coincided perfectly with a lot of people trying to get home and made the commute and evening nothing but fuck ups. Buses stuck, cars abandoned, roads blocked, etc. Most commutes home, whether by car or bus, that would normally take a half hour or so ended up taking anywhere from 1-4 hours. MAX seemed to do okay, though.

I had a similar experience flying to Portland from New York several years ago. My planes were following a storm. The sun was shining wherever I landed, but the scenes inside the airports were total chaos — long lines and crabby fliers. Everytime I checked in for my next flight, the people behind the counters were frazzeled and kept apologizing for the problems caused by "the weather" that looked fine to me. So, yeah, it was a mess during Tuesday evening's commute, but most of it passed by the time you got into town.

This is a summary of my four hour commute home from Hillsboro to Lents.

http://tinyurl.com/yedr6rz

Biggest problem was the complete lack of control at the top of Sylvan. It was like doing slaloms, uphill, with stalled cars every which way (left! right! middle!) and packed powder on the surface with no apparent sand down.

I honestly think more than 200 cars were stalled on Sylvan Hill. At least 40 were still on the side of the road this morning.

for me the most frustrating part was around 10pm when the major roads were mostly clear and traffic had calmed down. the buses weren't running on anything that remotely looked like a schedule - it took me over 2 hours to get home and i met a lot of people who had been waiting for over an hour and a half for a bus on a frequent service route. what gives?

Our lives are terribly boring so snow adds a little excitement. We also like more extreme weather events like hurricanes as well as terrorism. The latter really gives us something to get excited about. All of it gives the media a reason to sell advertising and tell us why we should be scared.

Reymont - As soon as the snow starts sticking. You know, like EVERY other city in the world that gets snow.

'Are you going to pay for it?'
I already pay them to make the roads safe.

'What good would sanding and plowing do, in that case?'
The snow is still there on many streets (weds. afternoon.)
Navigable roads after 5 p.m. would have allowed a lot of people to get home a lot sooner.

Again, I'm not whining, I have no problem driving in it. The problem lies in either reacting too late and in many cases I've seen over the years not acting at all and telling people 'stay home'

Portland is hardly the most mountainy, wintery city in the US, yet people are consistently unable to function at a basic level with a couple inches of snow.

my normal 15 minute commute took just over an hour. On hawthorne, I saw a bus stuck almost perpendicular to the street, that had somehow slid backwards and lodged itself on a parked car, leaving one lane worth of space for both directions of traffic.

It was pretty slick, and the combination of the city's inability to deal with something like this like a better equipped city could, and the fact that there were a LOT of people out there without the experience to better drive in those kinds of conditions, led to it actually being pretty bad out there.

If you're accelerating and you lose traction, lay off the gas, correct the direction you're going, and then slowly start accelerating so you don't lose traction again. Don't keep gassing it while trying to correct yourself.

If you're stopping and you lose traction, lay off the break, correct the direction you're going, and then try stopping slower, so you don't lose traction again. Don't press the break harder and try to steer in the opposite direction, it won't help.

If you don't have the time to stop lower, you were following too close.

The whole hour it took to get home, I saw people doing this stuff everywhere.

My usual 30 minute commute took about 50 minutes. Actually not bad because the delay was mostly due to me driving 20-25 mph most of the way, and the 3 intersections where I had a slight wait to get through. I am a more than competent snow driver. So, I was able to avoid the snarls by:
1. noticing the Ross Island Bridge was FUBARed well before I even started my car (one of the benefits of the view from my office) and choosing to us the Hawthorne bridge which was relatively traffic-free
2. Cutting through Ladd's Addition and over to Clinton street which was EMPTY - one of my intersection delays occurred at 7 corners and 2 more when I had to navigate 39th from Clinton over to Lincoln.
3. Taking Lincoln Street to 50th - then 50th to Powell
4. Taking a EMPTY Powell eastbound to 92nd and then a brief minute later, I'm home.

All of this was accomplished with a manual transmission, Front Wheel Drive 1996 Honda Civic that had regular old radials and zero traction devices. I have to say, it is probably the 2nd best snow driving car I've ever had - #1 was my trusty 1970 VW bug that I drove for 3 Spokane winters.

The only trouble with a VW bug is the floor pan, which is flat. If the snow gets too deep, then it will just raise the car up off the tires and you are stuck. Plus, on the old Bugs, the heater isn't worth a damn.

Well, my VW didn't have a floor pan to speak of - it had a piece of plywood on the passenger's side, and the side of a combine welded in on the driver's side. I only got high centered once in it, and I had enough large smelly boys in the car to lift it up and shovel out from underneath the tires.

The heater was suck-tastic though but they make auxillary blower systems that fix the problem, somewhat. I just used an ice scraper on the inside of the window on the occasions when the defroster couldn't hack it.

But, for $400 (actually $100 because I sold the engine for $300 when the transmission finally bit the dust) it was an amazing little ride.

I'm on my 7th air-cooled VW since '88, and they do great in the snow. That shit about the pan is ridiculous. The car still weighs a metric ton, and features more ground clearance than the average auto. And if you take the time to clean out you heater ducts, the stock heat will cook you alive.

Also, that storm (please!) was a blip on the radar for anywhere but this hysterical city. I'm a trucker by trade, and I saw more idiotic, inexperienced driving during that commute than I've seen in 15 years of running all over The Pacific Northwest.

Want to know the number one reason traffic sucked like it did? Find a mirror! A few tips: An inch of slush does not mean 15mph. A steep hill is not a place to come to a dead stop. A lifted diesel pickup will spin out as surely as a beat-down Neon. Chains go on before you're stuck. Turn signals, headlights, and courtesy should still be used during inclement weather. Spinning your tires will not get you anywhere, not matter how hard you mash the pedal...

This city's utter ineptitude is the laughingstock of the nation. New York, Chicago, KC... When it snows everywhere else, life goes on. Here, it grinds to a pathetic halt.

It took me four hours to get the 12 miles from from Vancouver, where I work, to SE Portland (pretty close-in). There were no over-turned or crashed cars on the highway or accidents that were visible during that time. It was mostly just people driving extremely slow, even though the highway was pretty much cleared off due to the amount of cars. It was extremely frustrating and could have been avoided had people actually tried driving more that 4 miles per hour or not stopped moving altogether.

The only thing more annoying than people who can't drive in the snow is people whining about people who can't drive in the snow.

'Are you going to pay for it?'
@D: I already pay them to make the roads safe.

I gave someone a $5 for "dinner." When the dinner didn't include real silver silverware, soup, salad, and dessert, I started whining about it on a blog. 20 years later, they'd raised their prices to $6, and I complained that it was a ripoff on the blog too. Of course, everyone else on the blog thought I was an idiot, but why should that stop me?

Hey, Matt and Stu,

Your posts are ridiculous. One of you doesn't grasp the potential of interactive media, and the other is embarressed about his inability to handle that scary snowstorm.

Get with it!