(from the completely frivolous chatter end of the MPSIMS spectrum)
I’m scheduled to fly to Rochester NY for business this week.
So apparently this “Elektra” storm is just going to completely f*** me this week. Highs are forecast in the 20s, lows at 13 or so. Snow every freaking day. If I add up the daily accumulations correctly, it looks like there may be 20 inches on the ground when I leave on Thursday.
I’m not looking forward to this. But, hey, this is why I’m paid the mediocre dollars.
Sorry about that - if you rent a car, be careful of the Can of Worms, it can get nuts when it is slippery out.
I can remember back in the early 80s when a Christmas snowstorm stranded me at home in Hilton for a week, and the lake was frozen out almost half a mile.
Note that snow coming down doesn’t equal snow on the ground.
It’s possible to have 2" of snow recorded at the airport during the day but less snow on the ground at night than in the morning. The lake effect stuff evaporates quite readily. (Which is different from the wet stuff from an actual storm, sorry to say.)
The weather guys at the Buffalo and Rochester airports are always in a contest to see which city gets more snow. So they check their snow gauges a lot during the day and are trying to maximize the amount of measured snow.
They are pretty good about plowing and salting (and salting and salting …) the roads. 13 is getting into the range where salt is losing its effectiveness. But most of the daytime you should see wet roads once the plows have gone thru. Just be careful on overpasses and such.
It’s technically the fall (winter doesn’t start until 12/21) but all that’s falling these days are snowflakes!
In meteorological definitions, winter starts December first. But in terms of actual weather, winter in Upstate New York started sometime before Thanksgiving this year.
And it begins. My first scheduled flight has been cancelled, which means both it and my connection are now bumped back about 4 hours. That puts me on the LAST flight of the day into Rochester. Flying the last flight to anywhere is risky, even more so flying into a city where it is currently snowing.
Ugh.
The Can of Worms hasn’t existed for a quarter century.
The local forecasts show almost no real snow after today. I’m assuming that the cancellations are from the originating airport since it’s not snowing here now. By Thursday there should be no problem.
You’re right that the last flight of the day is almost always delayed. My wife winds up on those a lot. But they are almost never cancelled.
The original Can of Worms is gone but the intersection still exists. It’s just been redesigned so traffic flows more smoothly through it and we don’t get the massive back-ups we used to get.
So that people understand the “Can of Worms” thing. (Which existed at least as far back as the 1970s.)
Here’s how you design an interchange between two freeways: have each direction run parallel to each other. Put in a short “merge zone” where people can switch from one to another. But they’re not really switching from one to the other. If they stay in their lane, they end up on the other freeway. To stay on their freeway, they have to switch over. Utterly fail to understand that almost everyone wants stay on their freeway, i.e., almost everyone needs to switch over. All in two adjacent lanes in a short stretch of road.
It’s better now, so calling it still the Can of Worms is unfair. More like a Can of Larvae.
But, why call it the can of worms if the problems that earned it that name have been resolved?
It wasn’t really the problem of traffic crossing lanes that led to the name. If that had been the case, the area would have been nicknamed the Hellhole or something like that. The Can of Worms nickname supposedly came about because of all the various roads meeting in that area and twisting around for their intersections. Somebody looking at the map said it looked like a can of worms.
Being as the roads still do intersect and have actually gotten more complicated on the map, the nickname is still justified.
An alternative would be Amtrak. Fly into some place with good weather. Take a taxi from the airport to the Amtrak station. Then Amtrak to Rochester. Or perhaps car to Amtrak, then Amtrak all the way…
Haven’t you seen Planes, Trains & Automobiles?
It got a name originally because it slowed everybody down and backed up traffic. It was going to get some local nickname and that happened to be the Can of Worms. The fix turned it into a normal intersection like every other one in the city. I haven’t heard anybody call it the Can in years. There’s no reason to because the reason it got a name was eliminated. It’s just an old memory today.
