Record Colds in many places

[Pete from Boston]

The "four wheel drive handles snow better" myth needs to die.  It doesn't matter how many wheels are powering the car if the tires are skidding.

Except if you're driving uphill or accelerating from a stop. Then it really does handle snow better. It just doesn't make a difference once you're at speed and you try to slow down.

The myth that you can drive as if the roads are dry when the roads are snowy in 4WD needs to die, but 4WD does handle snow better. If you drive a 4WD car the same way you would a FWD car, you'll have a better time. You're as likely to end up in the ditch, but you're less likely to spin your wheels a shit ton when accelerating from a stop or have to corrective-steer your way up hills, so it does handle better. But don't drive differently.

And that is one reason why I have a manual with snow tires.  And most of the people who talk about four wheel drive refer to skids.

Those people may actually be thinking about traction control technologies that can be added to a four-wheel drivetrain, which intelligently transfer power to the driving wheels and away from the slipping wheels. That could indeed help prevent a skid, or even correct for a low-speed skid in some cases. But in and of itself, four-wheel drive gives its greatest advantage when starting off in slippery conditions.

I hate that technology. My reflexes are well-honed to correct when things start to go awry, so traction control scares the crap out of me if I don't expect it. I remember driving a rental car down an onramp in Colorado Springs once, in one of those situations where the ramp is nasty but the freeway is fine, so I wanted to get up to speed even though the surface on the ramp was bad. I started slipping, expecting that I'd probably slip a little bit (that is quite likely to happen when you try to accelerate 0-75 on packed snow), but that's fine in the name of getting up to speed, gently started corrective-steering, and then traction control came on and the corrective steering didn't do what it would normally do because the wheels were also correcting for me, causing me to overcorrect, making a not-bad (even expected- I've done that dozens of times. Losing traction isn't scary when you expect to lose traction.) situation into a fairly scary one. Fortunately I was going uphill so it was easy to recover. I immediately turned traction control off and enjoyed the rest of the trip, though I did merge onto the freeway a bit slower than I planned.

Moral of the story- if you have no idea what you are doing, traction control is good. Otherwise you may be better served just to shut it off.

I had a loaner while my 4WD was in the shop, and it snowed about 6 inches in 3 hours.  The loaner's traction control was completely useless in the snow.  You could dump even the most dimwitted New Englander's driving logic into a car and it'd manage better than the traction control system. 

Folks who discount 4WD in snow either don't know how to drive or assume that no one else does.  Neither matters to me, since I see the truth of the matter every day.  4WD is a godsend.

The best part here is that with all the nasty @#$%s letting all their aggression out defending their life's highest accomplishment -- shoveling out a parking space -- I don't need to shovel anything, and just drive into and out of unshoveled spaces at will. 

I've driven over 60mph in heavy traffic in Toronto in worse than that. Words fail me.

(Quickly ETA: Everyone else was ALSO doing 60. We all made it through fine.)

On the GSP northbound during the Presidents' Day Storm, I was in a swarm of dozens of cars in Union County, snow falling 2" per hour, temps under 15, no lanes discernable nor observed (and adjacent cars just barely visible) and everyone managed to get along safely.  It's not that hard.

[empirestate]

Folks who discount 4WD in snow either don't know how to drive or assume that no one else does.  Neither matters to me, since I see the truth of the matter every day.  4WD is a godsend.

I don't think the problem is that people discount it, but that they give it too much credit. We know that 4WD is quite useful in snow, but there always seem to be folks who think it does things it can't do, like prevent you from going into a skid on the freeway at 70mph.

[ZLoth]

10 things weather forecasters won't tell you

[cpzilliacus]

N.Y. Times: A Severe Winter Breaks Budgets as Well as Pipes

SYRACUSE – Century-old water mains here have ruptured behind City Hall, popped in residential areas and split under the city's bar and restaurant district. The mayor says she has personally reported three breaks, while exhausted crews work 18-hour shifts in subfreezing temperatures to repair the damage.

In Detroit, a break in a 30-inch main flooded a southwest neighborhood on Tuesday, turning streets into streams and stalling cars in water above their hubcaps. As city workers pumped away the water, and police officers and firefighters rescued stranded motorists, icebergs formed above the blacktop, locking some vehicles into place until the next thaw.

[ZLoth]

From Bloomberg Businessweek:

The Official Forecast of the U.S. Government Never Saw This Winter Coming

Surprised by how tough this winter has been? You're in good company: Last fall the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states. This graphic shows just how wrong the official forecast of the U.S. government was:

FULL ARTICLE HERE

[KEK Inc.]

Weather is windy and rainy in Seattle for the past few days.  We've had a dry season so far, so ironically enough people think it's a big deal when it's raining now. 

[hotdogPi]

Northeast Massachusetts:

Snowstorms the last few days  but will get up to 50 on Friday.