Looks like our city and the GADOT is going to be a lot more prepared for this upcoming winter (I alluded to this one one of my last fanart pictures) They bought 40 additional snowplows and 24 Salt/Sand trucks. They don't want a repeat of January again where most of us were stuck inside for an entire week.
* I know noone here has said this, but to make it clear, the several inches of snow wasn't the problem, they actually do a pretty decent job with that, it was the very thick layer of ice that accumulated on top of the snow. When I tried to measure the snow in my frontyard I had to use the ruler to beat on the ice so I could get down to it.
Snow actually is much easier to drive on. Hopefully those trucks help but in cases like that my area doesn't even bother with side roads/residential areas. Too much of a risk to get trucks into areas with lots of on street parking. Guess the best they can do is work on the main roads.
I know, that's why I mentioned that they do pretty well when it's an all snow event, it's the ice that causes the chaos for them to keep the interstates clear. In the case of the January 9/10 2011 snowstorm, it was mainly heavy snow/sleet, but at the very end as the storm was departing it changed over to freezing drizzle building a thick glaze on top of the snow, to make matters worse, the snow when it first started caused whiteout conditions so quite a few drivers who were on I-20, I-75/85, or 285 had to abandon their cars and walk home which only hindered the cleanup process further because the trucks had to maneuver around the scattered cars until either the owners came back for them or they were towed out of the way. It also didn't help that the GADOT refused to clean major streets within Atlanta because of some BS about them not being state owned roadways. They are partly to blame for our city being shutdown for an entire week and why our mayor had to take matters into his own hands and make calls for snow plows/salt trucks to be brought in from other states mostly from the Midwest Region help us out. There was a delay in that also because the GADOT had to authorize this move.
It may have been a bad storm economically and an inconvenience for those of us who missed a week of school and work, but at least the GADOT and Atlanta learned a hard lesson and woke up to realize that just because were in the south that doesn't mean we can't be hit hard and everything will just melt overnight so we have to be prepared for the worse and hope for the best. I was also happy to hear yesterday that they are building 7 more garages to help cut back on trip times to refill on salt and sand in the most affected areas across the city.
EDIT: Wow, I gotta stop making these long posts, I have a bad habit of doing that. I'm not sure if it's because I'm a writer so I tend to go on and on when I'm typing my thoughts. I said more in this post than I would if you were actually talking to me.