I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I understand that the entire delicate network of our civilization collapses whenever two snowflakes fall within a minute of each other. Heck, I probably only drove in honest-to-goodness snow two or three times the entire time I was in high school.
I, however, had the good fortune to attend Winter Driving Boot Camp, otherwise known as winter in east central Illinois, where you don’t have the luxury of staying home because there is snow on the ground. To be fair, it’s a lot easier to drive on snow in east central Illinois because there are no hills and all the roads run in perfectly straight lines. Nevertheless, there are certain skills associated with maneuvering a ton or more of motor vehicle on a slick surface, skills that don’t get much honing in our beloved Stumptown.
But none of that could possibly justify the Mongolian cluster-f*ck that was traffic in PDX last night.
As the snow started falling in earnest, and perhaps upon seeing the panic in their employees’ eyes, my employer closed the office early to give everybody a chance to get home before it got worse. I delayed a bit, tidying up a few loose ends, and I left the office just a bit after 4:30.
I headed toward highway 26, but soon ran into traffic backed up from Canyon all the way past Lincoln high school, so I decided to turn around and get on Broadway. I drove back into downtown on Salmon, and shortly ran into gridlock, as in the traffic lights were cycling, but nothing was moving an inch. After five or ten minutes idling in place, I turned and made my way down along the south park blocks, until I found an opportunity to get over to Broadway. Once on Broadway, I reasoned, traffic would be moving better.
Wrong. Traffic on Broadway was crawling. Looking back at the evening, this is when things went straight to hell. As Broadway runs south into PSU, it runs uphill. It’s not much of a slope, but you know it if you’re riding a bike. Or are trying to drive on ice. I began to spin out whenever I tried to creep forward, a very unpleasant situation in stop-and-creep traffic. What’s worse, with the snow covering up the lane lines, Broadway once again became three lanes, and I was trapped in the center lane. Even if I got to the side, there was no room to put on chains. Feeling steadily more and more trapped, I kept creeping up the hill, a few feet at a time, front wheels spinning furiously.
Once I got to where Broadway crosses 405, my worst fears were realized: I couldn’t make it up the hill. Spin as they might, I couldn’t get any traction with the front wheels. By this time, I’d made it to the right lane, and there was some room at the side of the road, so I backed over to the side and put my chains on. Which wasn’t easy. Because I have bad knees. And no gloves. And I had to start over when I realized I was putting them on backwards, but I persevered.
And just as I finished tightening the chains and stepped away from the car a Tri-Met bus fishtailed over and took the side mirror off my little Corolla.
By some miracle, the bus only took out my driver’s side mirror. I quickly whipped out my phone and snapped a pic of the license plate of the bus, in case the driver simply didn’t realize he’d hit me and kept going.
I was actually very lucky. A few more inches and I would have lost the driver’s-side door and front quarter-panel. A few minutes earlier, and it would have been ME that got crunched as I crouched by the front wheel putting on chains.
I needn’t have worried about the bus making a speedy getaway. It couldn’t make it up the hill over 405 either. It swung back and forth as it tried, like some primordial leviathan struggling in a net, until it was finally exhausted, and made its way slowly to the curb. After a moment, the driver emerged and walked towards me.
“Um…did I…?” he asked.
“Yup.” I said.
The Tri-Met driver was completely cordial, and immediately retrieved the necessary paperwork from his bus. We exchanged information, and I took down the names and numbers of a couple of witnesses (just in case). With that taken care of, I still had to get my poor abused Corolla back home. By now it had been at least two hours since I started home. “Surely” I thought “traffic is moving a little better by now.”
HA!!
I crawled, and I do mean crawled, painfully up and over 405, and then stopped, because nothing was moving. There, at the confluence of Broadway, Broadway Drive, the off-ramp from 405, and 6th and 5th avenues, it was a big parking lot. As far as the eye could see, nothing was moving. I sat there for at least 20 minutes, hemmed in and not moving a single Goddamn inch. Eventually, and oh so slowly, we crept down the hill. Like molasses flowing downhill in January, I crept down Broadway towards Barbur Boulevard. At one point I tweeted that I had come about three miles in three hours, and that it didn’t bode well for the rest of my trip home.
As the evening passed, I listened to the “Capitol Steps” on OPB. I sent text messages to my worried wife, giving her status updates every few hundred yards or so. I deeply regretted that last cup of coffee of the day. I watched my fingernails grow. I aged. And I crept imperceptibly southward.
At one point, having gotten sweaty while putting on my chains, I rolled down my window to enjoy the cool and fresh night air, and watch the snowflakes drift down. That lasted about a minute before a tanker truck came barreling the other way up Barbur, inexplicably driving down the center of the road where the snow was thickest.
*POW!* A barrage of wet slush was flung against and into my car. And against the side of my head. Road slush packed into my ear and down my collar.
So much for the cool night air.
My rate of travel didn’t substantially improve until I finally reached the top of the Barbur hill, where another Tri-Met bus sat abandoned in the roadway, resting almost perfectly perpendicular to the flow of traffic, like some guerrilla roadblock. Was this the cause of the slowdown? Probably a cause, certainly not the only one. However after passing that chokepoint I could drive at almost normal speeds, and was soon pulling into my driveway, back in Beaverton.
Elapsed time, door-to-door, nearly five hours. A commute that on a moderately bad day could take 45 minutes had taken more than six times that long. Under normal driving conditions, that’s enough time to drive to Eugene, eat dinner at my old BBQ joint, and drive back, without pushing it. What went wrong?
The Buses
Aside from the fact that one hit my car, the fact that it tried and failed to get up Broadway tied up traffic substantially, and it ended up at the side of the road, creating an obstacle to maneuver around. Another bus was stalled halfway up the Capitol Highway exit from Barbur, blocking that road completely. Then there was the one neatly creating the barricade at the top of Barbur. From talking to a few other folks, there were buses tying up traffic all over town. Someone should have gotten chains on the buses sooner, and drivers should have had the good sense not to keep going when it was becoming clear they wouldn’t be able to make their routes.
The Drivers
It’s easy to pick on Portland drivers, but this has nothing to do with driving skills, and everything to do with courtesy and patience. The traffic snarls were made infinitely worse by drivers who crowded into intersections when they had NO chance of moving out of them, blocking the way for all cross-traffic (of course, the cross-traffic would then move into the intersections in return, blocking the original flow of traffic). If you think you might not be able to get all the way across the intersection by the time the light changes, don’t enter the freaking intersection.
Then there were the drivers who were driving beyond their skill levels. If you have no traction and your wheels are spinning furiously, pull over. If you have chains, put them on. If you don’t, stay put. You don’t do anybody any good pinballing down the roadway, and it doesn’t matter that you have a big four-wheel drive truck.
As a sort of postscript, some folks have wondered aloud why I kept going instead of turning around or pulling over. In the beginning, I assumed that once I got a few more blocks that traffic would clear up, and by the time I began to realize how bad it was, going back was just as impossible as going forward. I suppose I could have stopped somewhere for a snack and to wait it out, but again, by the time I realized how bad it truly was I was locked onto Broadway/Barbur, with few opportunities to get off without risking getting stuck, and nowhere that I particularly wanted to spend time. Once I got to Burlingame, where there were things to do, traffic was moving again and there was no need. But mostly, I just wanted to get home.
I used to wonder why so many adults cursed the snow. Snow was beautiful. Snow was pure. Snow was one of the few things that can make you feel like a child again.
But I don’t think I will ever see snowflakes with the same unjaundiced view I once had, because lurking behind each fluffy crystal will be the long shadow of the commute from hell.
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I was stuck on a TriMet bus yesterday for 2 1/2 hours as it tried to travel down NE Broadway into downtown (we had tickets for Rain at Keller Auditorium; I wisely decided to bail on driving myself.)
The biggest problems I witnessed (and yes, I had plenty of time to observe) were many of the ones you stated already: inconsiderate, impatient drivers and/or drivers who didn’t have the sense to get out of the snow already. The numbers of delays I could attribute to drivers who could care less about ‘blocking the box’ were legion, for example.
But here’s another huge issue from my perspective: the unholy trinity of car/bus/light rail traffic on 5th and 6th Avenues (tenuous at best during good weather, in my opinion) completely broke down last night. I watched minivans parked on the right side where buses were trying to get in and out, cars who assumed that all was fair in love & war during snowy weather, or buses who went a little Rambo-style.
While I’m glad I wasn’t driving myself, I do wish I’d have turned a deaf ear to the kid who was so so so excited about Rain & wouldn’t hear about not going.
My sentiments exactly. You perfectly described exactly what the problem was last night. There were more idiots in trucks that didn’t know what they were doing causing problems, than people in little FWD cars. I too contemplated stopping somewhere and waiting it out, but by that point I just wanted to get it over with and get home. I was determined to beat the traffic!
After taking 80 minutes to get from 11th/Hawthorne to 42nd/Sandy, I made my way to Panera and waited there for a couple hours with wifi and a nice bowl of soup. After the roads had cleared out a bit I hopped onto Sandy eastbound and traffic was pretty smooth out to 205. The freeway was wet, speed-limit driving from there up into Vancouver.
“If you think you might not be able to get all the way across the intersection by the time the light changes, don’t enter the freaking intersection.”
Yes, THANK YOU!!
After it taking a full hour to cruise from SW 1st and Arthur to NW 4th and Couch, I pulled over, parked my car and hit the Davis Street Tavern. Enjoyed a few classes of good scotch, some happy hour treats and the view of the gridlock outside. From there I traversed to Kelly’s Olympian where I enjoyed the company of friends and continued to keep an eye on traffic. Traffic was finally winding down enough to get around, I was happy to have avoided the earlier insanity (with the exception of the lost hour in icy gridlock) and to be heading up West Burnside toward home. This is when I discovered that in addition to the ice, snow, slush (which doesn’t faze me in the least given past driving experiences on the mountain and in E Washington winters), there was a graveyard of abandoned vehicles all the way up the hill… sometimes three deep on a single side of the road. Even in my little Prius, I could barely squeeze between these sleeping discards. It’s a minor miracle I got home without getting roadblocked completely. This city should not go ANYWHERE in the snow if this is the skill level of our drivers. Might as well camp out in our offices and call it a night. Yikes!
Your story actually sounds like pretty much every other story I heard of from friends and family attempting to drive home last night. Whether they stayed on the road the whole time or they waited it out somewhere, it took them approximately 4-5 hours from the time they left and the time they got home. I had a friend livestreaming his being stuck in traffic to make the most of the time.
I took the 17 from downtown to SE Portland around 5:30 pm. It completely filled up at our stop and we spent at least an hour getting from Salmon to the end of the transit mall on 5th. I’m assuming for many of the reasons you listed, although the windows were so fogged up that we couldn’t really see.
Our 17 and three others like it were vacated around SE 31st and Holgate due to another 17 that had spun out onto the road, blocking passageway for all but cars, much like you mentioned on Barbur. There was another 17 in a similar situation at SE 40th and Holgate. On the way in this morning, I saw that at least one 17 bus stop had been taken out by an errant vehicle.
My mother’s workplace gathered war stories this morning, and the 5-hour commutes were topped out by a van that exploded into flames in front of one of her coworkers’ houses. Assumption is that the van got stuck, created a spark while spinning its wheels, and ignited. Nobody was hurt, but the photo sums up the day for me: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=39762639&id=11500370
I’ve hated the snow since being trapped during an especially inconvenient time (trying to move) during last year’s two weeks of ice, but I thought after the city dealt with so much last year, that we wouldn’t fall apart so utterly over a couple of inches this year. Either we fall apart like this every time and didn’t know until Twitter and Facebook were so widely used, or everybody went collectively insane yesterday.
Oops, public version of that van on fire is actually at http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=39762639&l=34c2406927&id=11500370
I worked from home that day and watched the traffic out my window while enjoying some hot chocolate. Does that count?
I’m a little like Gretchen…I was on vacation, and watched from home and thought ‘ohhh…that sucks…I think I’ll have another glass of wine…’ Does that count?
Honestly, though, I did feel for each and every one of you…thanks for bringing it to life, PAgent.
I’m so glad you wrote this, it described perfectly many of the thoughts I had last evening. I will take this opportunity to rant and rant and rant about my horrible experience from yesterday.
I left work from north portland at about 5:00 pm, and got home at about 9:10 pm. Usual commute time is about 20 minutes, all highway travel.
My husband and I were stuck on the Fremont bridge for TWO HOURS. I’m afraid of heights, so I spent the entire time in the fetal position on the phone with my mommy who was making it worse by reminding me that I’m in my 40’s. At one point we began to skid backwards, and a kindly truck driver appeared out of nowhere and helped us push and steer the car forward. But I tell you it was like a war scene on that bridge with people’s wheels spinning on ice, trucks jack-knifed, abandoned and broken down vehicles, nobody moving, and no sign of ODOT.
The second part of the journey was through residential NW portland, where we connected to Hwy 26. We drove on side streets and got really stuck. Another kindly citizen, a young man appeared offering to help push us over an icy patch. As he was doing this, a woman came up alongside the passenger side and began taking pictures of me with a flash camera. I looked at my tear-stained makeup streaked face in the mirror, rolled down the window, and in my most patient voice yelled “are you fucking serious lady??” She turned out to be the kindly citizen’s mother, and she made the hand signal to her son shut the fucker down and move away from helping us. Immediately afterwards, another kindly citizen appeared and took his place, as if kindly citizens were just coming out of my ass now. This time we made it past the icy patch, and were soon onto Hwy 26.
Hwy 26 moved slowly but surely, if anyone had stopped – we’d all go downhill skidding backward, so luckily that didn’t happen. I saw a lot of abandoned vehicles on the sides of the road, and thought to myself – good for you – refusing to sleep in your car tonight is a normal response to this catastrophe.
I live on Jefferson St right next to KGW and had the best show in town watching people try to make it down the hill and up US26. Last year was the same thing, living downtown I was able to walk everywhere and didn’t have too much of a problem except walking in snow and everything being closed.
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