And yeah, the snow is wetter there and tends to form ice much more easily, so there is that factor as well.
The main industry in NoVA is screwing taxpayers.
Bureaucracy
The underlying problem in DC and NoVa is that, while we do get occasional snow, serious snowstorms are infrequent and it melts off quickly. That has obvious implications for the level of preparedness that is appropriate. How much money do you want your local government to spend on equipment that is needed for about three days every six years?
Once in awhile, a nor’easter decides to take a dump on us, and does. I live in DC. I was here in ‘79, when we got the second worst snowstorm on record. I was here for the infamous Superbowl storms, when Marion Barry chose to run off and hobnob in sunny climes with the rest of the glitterati while DC got hit by 12” and 13” snows two days apart. I was here for Snowmageddon, which is the storm the Millennials remember.
We have been overdue for a good snowstorm. What we got yesterday was a decent but not especially large storm. I get the impression that a number of our local governments seriously fumbled their response. That was certainly the case here on Capitol Hill. My younger daughter is home from college and is working as many hours as she can at her ongoing local jobs in order to support her lavish student lifestyle when she gets back to school. Her job is two miles away. I ventured out about 3:30 to drop her off. It was awful. Even main streets on Capitol Hill had not been touched. This was 4-5 hours after the storm tapered off in late morning. No plows, no sand, no salt. Being a freeper, I am of course mild mannered and soft spoken, but by the time I got home, I was uttering words I never thought would escape my lips, “This makes Marion Barry look good.”
But it will all be melted off in a couple of days.
My favorite local snow story: The Woodrow Wilson bridge carries the beltway/I-95 over the Potomac River. DC today consists of 63 square miles north of the river due to the long-ago retrocession of the Virginia portions of the original District of Columbia. But if you look at the original map of DC, the eastern corner of the original District projects several miles downriver and includes the Woodrow Wilson bridge.
The northern approaches to the bridge run for several miles through Maryland. The southern approaches to the bridge run several miles through Virginia. The bridge itself is technically in DC. One year when we had a serious storm, the Maryland people cleared the Maryland approaches and the Virginia people cleared the Virginia approaches, but no one cleared the bridge itself, which created a snarl that lasted several days.