A winter's tale of two cities

Snowing and blowing hard here today -- probably going to be 25 cm* of snow on the ground here by the time it lets up, and we're getting off lightly compared to the good folk over in New England.

The storm has led me to ponder some of the differences between the way the UK and Canada cope with messy winter weather.  In the UK, there's an almost childlike excitement about the potential arrival of snow, but not much is done to prepare for it.  When the snow duly arrives -- and keep in mind,  in the UK anything above a couple of centimeters is classed as heavy snow by most of the media -- people expect to go about their daily business as if nothing was happening, and get righteously angry when they can't.  Then the cry goes up: "How come this country comes to a standstill at the first whiff of snow, when other cities around the world cope so much better?"

Ah, but do they? Over in Boston they closed the city's transit system in anticipation of today's storm -- I can't remember that happening in the years I lived in London.  Across the lake from us in Toronto, train schedules were trashed, several hundred flights were cancelled and the roads (and ditches) are littered with crashed vehicles.

And it's not as if people don't try to prepare; in Toronto there are over 1100 vehicles (street ploughs, sidewalk ploughs and salters) out trying to keep things moving -- and that's not counting all the private ploughs and blowers working on store parking lots.  That's just in Toronto.  Here in little Niagara,  the small plough that does the side streets has already made two passes, and the three-bladed monster that does the wider streets has been by once.

When the weather's bad enough, things seize up a little. It's part of winter, and if you turn on the TV or radio here, you won't hear many people complaining about it, the way they inevitably do in the UK.  It's a completely different set of attitudes: in the UK, fail to prepare or to adjust your behaviour, then bitch bitterly.  In Canada and the US northeast, prepare assiduously, but accept that if the weather is really bad, it might be a bit inconvenient for a while, and just get on with things.

Speaking of snow, there was an interesting piece in the Toronto Star today about big snowfalls.  I was surprised to learn that Toronto has only had ten single-day snowfalls of more than 20 cm in the last 50 years.  People are fond of saying "we don't get winters like we used to" -- in fact, I had that very conversation with my neighbour earlier in the week as we cleared the last snowfall -- but at least by this very imperfect measure, that may not be true: we never did get winters like we think we used to.  I blame global warming.

* UPDATE, Feb 10 -- turned out to be more than 40 cm, a one-day record for the area.