I’ll make one more post about the snow and then leave it to the noisemakers and social climbers. As noted previously, the snow emergency rules are not what I would have expected. They don’t say you shouldn’t drive. They only say you shouldn’t park on snow emergency routes, and shouldn’t drive there without chains or snow tires.
Well, I looked over the list of snow emergency streets — the priority streets. There aren’t a lot of them. For example, I live in the middle of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. The nearest snow emergency routes are 3rd and 4th Avenue in lower Park Slope, Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush, Fort Hamilton Parkway in Kensignton, and the Prospect Expressway. In the whole of Windsor Terrace, plowing is theoretically a lower priority, and everyone is free to drive without snow tires and get stuck in the middle of the road. What would happen if there was an emergency — a fire or someone needed an ambulance on my street, and the Prospect Expressway exit ramp was the closed location passable?
Clearly, if you have a snow emergency, or perhaps a “severe snow emergency” as distinguished from a less restrictive snow emergency, people have to be told not to drive. Anywhere. Period. The cutoff might be whatever level of storm is likely to overwhelm snow clearance, or might do so depending on its track.
And a broader network of priority streets — the wide ones and perhaps some others if needed to bring emergency vehicles no more than a block away — need to be designated snow emergency streets and kept clear at all times. If that means that in a severe storm like this one residential side streets aren’t plowed for days, people will have to deal with it. Get out the shovels and do it yourselves if you really want to.
On these priority streets, rather than prohibiting parking, those who MUST drive to or for work would know to park their cars there in order to be able to get on the road when the emergency ended, and considerate neighbors would ceded those spaces to them. Not on the Prospect Expressway, of course, but on streets such as 8th, 10th and 11th Avenues, Prospect Park West and Southwest, Prospect Avenue, 9th Street, McDonald Avenue, etc. to use my neighborhood as an example.
The top priority should be emergency access. The second priority should be economic recovery — for people to be able to get to and move around the major business areas, and stores citywide to be able to get deliveries. The third priority might be side streets in auto-oriented areas, and bus routes not on wide streets. I’d gladly not have my street plowed for a week to avoid what happened Sunday night and Monday.