Why We Drive A Subaru

Aka What Winter Looks Like, aka Why An Outdoor Game is a Ways Away Yet

I took these photos this week while walking to work.  Every year we have this on going discussion with my brother in law (who lives in Halifax and is an expert on EVERYTHING). It basically goes like this "you really don't need all wheel drive, front wheel drive does almost as well and uses less gas and any way it's not a problem once they plow the streets", "but they don't plow the streets", 'yeaj but once they plow them it's not a problem"....

Anyway we've had 1.4m of snow and we rarely see a snow plow on anything but a major artery.  So the snow gets compressed down (on our street the multiply daily school bus trips do it nicely) into 4-6" of solid ice.  Think of Sedimentary Rock being transformed into Metamorphic Rock and you get hte idea.

Typical side street moonscape driving.  The university student in the background gives context of the snow bank and drift heights.

A neighbour cleared the sidewalk (that's a pavement to you Brits) down to bare concrete.  At the curbside (sic there is a curb in this photo) she found that her sidewalk was a couple of inches below the current driving surface.

Here the city has cleared the ice away from a manhole cover - note the 6" drop below driving level.  This one sits in the middle of an intersection of two side streets.

Tough to see but for most of the winter there was a car parked here.  Note the second car under the pile of snow on the left.  Because the car provided shelter - the bottom of the hole is the original paved street level.  The top of the hill is the current driving level.