You can’t “pahk yah cah in Hahvuhd Yahd” right now, and things are about to get worse.
A new winter storm has covered the South in ice and snow and is heading to the Northeast, which has already been hit hard this year.
The heavy snowfall has been front of mind all winter, but never more than in the past week.
Drivers are losing their minds in Boston as snow piles up on streets, making for a tight squeeze through most of the city’s roadways. Nestor Ramos of The Boston Globe talked to Car Talk host and acclaimed Bostonian Ray Magliozzi about the situation in the city. From their conversation:
Headstrong stalemates arise any time two cars confront one another in streets so narrow there is room for only one to pass. In Dorchester, a school bus bullies a Prius into backing up a block into someone’s semi-shoveled driveway. The driver throws her hands up and retreats into her smartphone while car after car blocks her path forward.
“Most people don’t like to back up,” Magliozzi said. “They want the other person to back up, because they don’t know how to do it. If you told these people they had to back up half a block, they’d shoot themselves.”
It’s also kind of a miracle they don’t shoot each other.
The snow has also inspired some positive interest in snow removal methods as well, including in Montreal, which deals with more than 80 inches of snow per year.
You can see a video of Montreal’s tactics in an article over at Deadspin, which also discusses removal in other cities like New York, where they apparently use “giant mobile hot tubs.”
But the snow removal industry isn’t the only one having trouble with all the precipitation and cold this winter. The travel industry has had it up to here, too.
Imagine trying to convince people to visit Ithaca, New York. The winter weather is so bad that the folks at visitithaca.com have either given up or developed with one of the best marketing campaigns in recent history.
The site, which usually displays all the beauty of upstate New York, now has a link to Key West’s tourist site with the caption, “Due to this ridiculously stupid winter, Ithaca invites you to visit The Florida Keys this week. Please come back when things thaw out.”
Not everyone’s down on the weather, however. Back in Boston, The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore caught several instances of “thundersnow” on camera over the weekend and his reaction has been buzzing over social media with #ItsAmazingOutThere ever since.
All in all, one thing is for sure: People never lose interest in a good weather story.
