I was raised in a small town in Iceland that would get snowed in like this several times during the winter. The next day the roads were being plowed clear and people peacefully went about their business. I’m sure this town had nowhere near the budget of Buffalo. This looks to me like a breakdown of authority and social norms. The new normal.
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Well it’s a democrat run city, so we know what the nature of the problem is. Buffalo proper still has a driving ban today. A friend from Buffalo and I were talking this morning and were discussing how a city like Buffalo, that routinely gets a lot of snow all at once, should have much more sophisticated snow removal procedures and equipment.
When I lived in Ottawa, we didn’t get a lot of snow at once but, because we were in a valley, the snow that came stayed ALL winter. The city didn’t move the snow, they removed the snow. Giant snow blower trucks were followed by 3 dump trucks and the snow blowers sucked up all the snow and blew it into the following truck. When that truck was full, it went to LeBreton Flats, and the second dump truck would move up to receive the snow. The first truck would dump its load and return to end of the truck line. We had city administrators from around the world visit Ottawa to learn about their snow removal techniques. A major advantage of this system of snow removal was that there were many fewer car and pedestrian accidents because the snow banks never got high enough that you couldn’t see around them. Buffalo could easily duplicate this system, but they mismanage their city.
As a fun side note, someone used to run a lottery in Ottawa where the game was to guess the day that the snow mountain at LeBreton Flats finally disappeared. It was never before June, and sometimes went into July.
They just can't pull it together. Ottawa has a heavy duty snow plan. Impressive. NY's snow plan is to put the governor on TV bladdering about this or that. When I lived in Colorado and drove a light pickup truck, I used to go to Home Depot and buy 2 or 3 sand bags and place them on the bed by the back wheels. Used to get a lot of traction driving in heavy snow. It was amazing.
If it were not a major city you could just roll it down, sand it, and drive on top until spring.