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Snow, snow and more snow

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This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

People back home are telling me that I’m lucky to have snow, but I’m not really seeing it that way. You may remember my post from last year (which appears to have been lost somewhere) in which I commented on how much I hate snow.

Well, here’s pretty much the same thing all over again:

I just went to the shops, a trip that should only have taken around 20 minutes to get there and back, but it took me nearly an hour. During this trip:

  • a car started sliding and nearly ran me over
  • I nearly fell over a few times due to overly slippery pavements
  • I went to step on what I thought was the pavement but was actually a downward slope of grass so my foot went under and my left shoe filled with snow which kept my toes nice and cold for the remainder of the walk.

Not only that, but I purchased an energy meter so I could see how much electricity we were actually using; turns out it didn’t contain batteries with it and there’s no way I’m going back to the shops in this.

Obviously there’s no way of stopping it from snowing, but I think more could be done to make it less of a chore to continue as normal in the snow. For example, the only roads that are cleared are the main roads. This is fine if you live on a main road, your destination is on a main road, and your entire journey uses these roads, but I’d estimate that 99% of journeys are going to end up going through a residential area at some point, and these roads are not cleared. I’d comment on a project that the government is wasting money on at the moment, but I’m not up to date as I haven’t seen the news in about 3 months.

The other problem, which directly affects me, and many others in Aberdeen with it being a student town, is that they refuse to clear the pavements. The governments message is “if it snows we’ll let you use your car but you can’t walk anywhere”? Surely by clearing the pavements they’d be less cars on the road, helping to cut carbon emmissions.

Think of the elderly, disabled, and others less able to move around. These groups are going to basically be captive in their own homes for this period for the ground is too slippery to venture out.

So once again, I ask: We know that it snows in the Winter, there’s all year to prepare, why don’t we?

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