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Comment by IdoRA | Hacker News Reader

Does increased numbers of plows allow you to clean this portion of road quickly enough to keep it navigable? The main issue is that the road is a sheet of ice, so as I understand it you really need chemical treatments, not just snow removal (although snow removal should certainly help). And does the density of cars pose a unique problem? The F’burg portion of 95 sees around 130,000 cars/day pre-pandemic.

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New York and Massachusetts are different, but usually the only thing that truly overwhelms them is lake effect snow in Western NY and some nor’easter events. I grew up in the NY metropolitan area, and things like flash floods ancient parkways in the Bronx were the only total disaster like this.

The key thing is that they have equipment and close roads to trucks. VA express lanes gouge drivers avoiding traffic, there should be plenty of money to put plows on 2 1/2 ton trucks.

I lived in Rochester. At least when I was up there, there may have been a hundred inches of snow in the year, but there was rarely fresh ice. This storm delivered a sheet of ice with snow on top, and because of the earlier rain, you couldn’t pre-treat the roads. How does the northeast deal with those conditions, other than people being smart enough to stay home? How do plows remove ice when the roads can’t be pretreated? I’m very, very open to the idea that VDOT is doing a bad job with winter road maintenance, but “more plows” isn’t a convincing improvement plan for the wintery mix seen here.

I currently live in Rochester and we recently just had a bit of a wintry mix the other day. Towns have their trucks going basically through the storm as it happens and they are able to prioritize emergency routes for both plowing and salt pretty well.Plus many folks up here are used to driving in these conditions and have the tires and or vehicles for it.

More plows in my opinion would definitely have helped as long as they were dispersing treated road salt. During snow storms, traffic on our interstates do not grind to a halt because there is a constant rotation of plows for every lane doing the best that they can to keep the priority routes clear.

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