I think I’d question that analysis. Much of it isn’t a loss to the economy, but just time shifted.
For example, if people can’t get out, they will cook up the food that they have in the house, and the grocery stores will show real low sales for those days. But eventually things are cleared up, and people can get around again. Then they will buy groceries again, and they will buy extra to restock their kitchens. So the stores low sales for the stormy days will be balanced out by high sales on later days.
This is true even for most work – the work not done on days people couldn’t get in just builds up on their desks, so later when the employees can get in, they have a backlog of work, and may have to work overtime hours to clear it up. The total of hours worked doesn’t change much.
The ones most hurt might be scheduled event businesses, like theatres & movie houses – they probably had very few customers, if they didn’t close altogether. Maybe only those close enough to walk there. But even then, while the lost days can’t be replaced, it’s common that after people have been cooped up at home for a few days like this, they tend to celebrate a bit when the roads are open again. So people will then go out to plays, movies, restaurants, etc. and they will have more customers for a few days, thus picking up most of the lost business. Only those that were completely selling out really suffer an unrecoverable loss from the closed-down days.
So I don’t think it’s correct to say that billions are lost to the economy each day. At the end of the month or year, most of that still went into the economy.
I live in the NW, in a Cul-de-Sac off a side road which is off another side road which is…oh you get the picture…I am marooned with my 8 neighbours and the gnomes.
As CRSP says above, baby it’s cold outside and like jjimm my car is also stuck in the driveway.
Yesterday I hoofed it to Tesco, about ½ mile away to get emergency stocks of alcohol and the place was practically deserted as were most of the shelves especially the bread ones.
Thankfully the booze shelves were quite well stocked so I got what was essential, whisky, rum and vodka plus a bag of crisps ( a man has to eat y’know) paid and made my way to the exit hoping to find a taxi. I did get one but he refused to take me to my door as he would have had extreme difficulty getting back out, so I hoofed it back.
Today I aint going anywhere, i’ll just sit here getting quietly pissed eventually to crash out on the settee.
There are, but it seems that many lack the skills to drive them. Most will have a set of normal road tyres on, as well. A faux-by-faux, with road tyres plus an inexperienced driver is fairly useless.
@meanoldman: There are a fair few, but they’re definitely not common. In urban areas having a car at all isn’t common. I live in London and have a very wide circle of friends and acquaintances but can only think of four of my friends in the city who own a car. People also don’t have snowchains or special tyres.
Agreed. For example last year when London was closed by snow: I couldn’t get in to teach, but the kids aren’t going to suddenly have no knowledge at all because of two days off for snow. My GF couldn’t get in to her accountancy job but she just made up the work over the next few days. And, frankly, that couple of days were full of fun and high spirits for nearly everyone; such morale boosting is going to, if anything, make employees more productive once they get back to work. Resting at home, like some people are having to do now, might put off some illnesses that people were developing.
Hell, some people would have been off sick anyway - the estimates of money lost to the economy always seem to assume full capacity, which really isn’t very likely, especially in January.
Even the trains and buses, which would have lost money due to fewer people travelling, would have clawed some of that loss back by not using up petrol or resources, and lots of people have travelcards anyway.
I would say that is an overstatement. It might be more accurate to say that the practice of not owning a car is more common among people who live in inner city areas. And 4WDs are absolutely everywhere.
And that’s households, not individuals - plus, with so many transient residents in London, who tend not to turn up on surveys, I’d say the proportion of households without cars is far higher in reality. There is no way in hell that 42.2% of households in Tower Hamlets own a car or a van - there aren’t even close to that many parking spaces, for a start. I live ten minutes’ walk from Liverpool St station and, trust me, it’s uncommon to own a car round here.
My block has 80 flats with 16 parking spaces available on the side streets (with no permits available further away); most of those parking spaces are empty most of the time even though these parking spaces serve a Tesco too. The neighbouring council blocks have hardly any parking spaces at all, and they’re so unused that the kids can use the whole car park as a play area. There’s practically no on-street parking nearby (and what there is is extremely expensive. £2 for twenty minutes on my road). If 42.2% of households really own cars and vans then where are all the vehicles? Nah - that stat just can’t be right.
4WDs seem to be everywhere but they’re still less common than cars that aren’t 4WD. It’s just that there are a lot more than there used to be, so it seems like there’s tons of them. Of course, some cars have 4WD but that’s the only feature they have which would actually help them in the snow, so they’re still not much better off.
Although nothing close to the amount they have in the US. I’ve just come back from New England where my hired Toyota Corolla was one of the few non-UV/4WD cars on the road and was described as a ‘compact’.
I was much impressed with the UV drivers in Maine who all had their own snow ploughs attached to the front. Not sure it’s really practical for Hackney, however.
I get what you’re saying, but I was actually thinking more of the implications of cutting gas off to the factories. If you’re operating at close 100% production capacity, you simply cannot make up the output in normal working conditions, or if you are able run the things 24/7 you have to find the extra money to pay overtime, which hurts the companies involved. And if it persists and manufacturers fail to meet orders, then buyers will go elsewhere. Of course we’re not a manufacturing economy any more, but the issue is there, and could prove costly.
Service industries rely on at-delivery payment, and if they aren’t being used, then they will lose money. E.g. a restaurant still has to pay salaries even when there’s nobody able to eat, and this can and does push cashflow for small businesses to the limit. I think it’s a bit simplistic to assume that all the people who put off eating their meals on, say Tuesday night, will rush to eat them on Friday.
You’re talking very much from a London-centric perspective. People don’t have cars here because they’re more a hindrance than a help (I drive mine once a week to go to Sainsburys). Outside of London, even in the major cities, cars are the transport of choice. I’m originally from Birmingham - ALL my teenage/early 20s nephews and nieces have cars, even though I’d argue that they don’t really need them (and certainly can’t afford them).
Yes, I am talking from a London-centric perspective. It’s not like I hid that.
Mind you, when I was a postgrad student in Leicester I only knew one person with a car in regular use (well, his wife had a car) and a couple of others who used cars now and then (though, TBF, I didn’t know many people there). Those of us without cars probably didn’t turn up on official statistics as households without cars, either. I expected most people there, even those in twenties like I was, to have some sort of vehicle, but it turned out that a lot of people didn’t. And there are a lot of students in their twenties in Leicester.
I don’t know if its as true now, but a few years ago I read that there were more Range Rovers in Chelsea than the whole of Wales. This is probably why 4x4’s are given the pejorative name of “Chelsea Tractors”
That’s entirely possible. Mind you, there are slightly more people in London than in the whole of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland combined, and that’s going by the official numbers on the census, not including all the people who don’t turn up on the census. OK, that’s not entirely relevant to the thread, but it’s a stat that’s always tickled me.
Your claim stands up for a sympathetic definition of “common” and if you look at the inner London boroughs only, although you did originally say “urban areas”. For Greater London, I make it about 40% of households that do not have a car, from those figures. I admit that I’m surprised it’s that high.
I live in south Croydon in Surrey (translation for furriners: a bit further south than Greater London itself). Snow fell on Tue, Wed and Thu and is still thick on the ground. Where it hasn’t been disturbed, the snow seems to be about 10-11 inches deep. I’m lucky enough to live near a place called Lloyd Park, a vast and beautiful public park combining open meadows with unspoilt woodland. I go there almost every day and it has been transformed into a stunningly beautiful Narnia.
All the main roads here are still perfectly drivable, either because the snow didn’t settle for too long on the roads before heavy usage cleared it away, or because Croydon council have done a fine job of salting and gritting. (The local council is something of a socialist utopia - in theory exchanging high taxation for a high standard of public services. We all grumble at the taxation, of course, but in fairness the level of public services IS very good.)
Side roads vary a lot - some are perfectly accessible whereas others look like they won’t be usable for a few days. People seem to be coping, one way or another. I saw a Fedex van making local deliveries yesterday and the driver’s approach seemed to be a 50/50 mix of dogged determination and ‘Not afraid to die’ recklessness. He was skidding and overshooting all over the place, going way too fast and almost falling over. Stupid and dangerous, yes, but in a small way also a bit admirable, in terms of refusing to be beaten by the conditions.
I’ve managed to drive around the area for a few essential local errands. The roads are a lot quieter than normal, which can only be A Good Thing, and of course one has to drive a bit more carefully than usual when negotiating icy patches.
To answer the OP, it’s a bad storm by our normal standards, but we’ll cope and survive in a typically British fashion. As a nation, we revisit these same questions every few years: to what extent should we budget for freakish conditions that come along rarely (by definition) and never last for very long? There’s no easy answer. A local council diverting a substantial part of its budget to prepare for conditions that seldom arise would be accused of foolishly wasting resources and failing to recognise far more urgent and worthwhile ways to spend money. But then when the snow comes… they get complaints because there aren’t an army of snow ploughs and drivers ready to roam the streets and instantly remove the problem.
I made it about 50% including the outer London boroughs. That was being generous, since Brockley and Upminster and the like can hardly be considered urban - they’re suburbs. Some of Upminster is farmland.
Edit: places like Cornwall are suffering from the snow even more, because, although lots of people there do have 4WD cars, they’re still not set up to expect much snow. A friend of mine just mentioned her husband having to walk everywhere because his truck is frozen shut.
The Forum for Private Business estimates that small businesses lose £230 million a day due to employee absenteeism when we have weather like this, and that’s just small businesses. Manufacturers and retailers can’t get people to work from home, in service industries you can’t just “work the extra hours” if the work isn’t there to do (a restaurant can’t just stay open for twice as long the next day), anyone involved with the stock market will miss a day of trading, etc, etc. Even if the total cost to the economy each day isn’t in the billions it won’t be that far off. http://www.fpb.org/news/2290
Well if we take the £230 million figure cited above, it would probably be less expensive - there’s about 150 local authorities responsible for dealing with the snow in their area, and I suspect an extra, say, £1 million each would be enough to stock up on a lot more grit, buy more gritters and pay more people to operate them. But the problem is how would you transfer that money? It’s not the government that loses £230 million in heavy snow, it’s small businesses. And it doesn’t make sense to raise their taxes to hedge against the possibility of freak weather that hasn’t happened for decades, on top of the fact that it wouldn’t be very fair for businesses to have to pay to clear everyone’s roads.
Salt will melt snow down to a certain temperature and then it doesn’t work. For home use it’s pretty much salt or another chemical compound (urea).
For streets it’s a different animal based on the temperature. Municipalities will use a combination of salt, salt/sand or liquid deicer. Last year there was a freak spike in salt which caught some cities by surprise and the cost varied wildly between cities. That’s when the use of a liquid deicer was introduced as a way of extending the salt. It’s gotten to be a real science. Also due to the spike in salt prices all the municipalities have put more effort into stocking up ahead of time and getting the price back down.
Unfortunately, we just had a bad accident with a tanker truck. It hit a mini-bus full of special needs adults who were sent home early from an educational center. The truck crossed the meridian of a highway during the worst of yesterdays snow storm. It wasn’t that bad of a storm.
I think urea is used in such locations as airport runways where salt would be corrosive to aircraft. I once got a bag of this stuff from somebody who was in the RAF, and used the stuff on my lawn. Because it’s high in nitrogen content, I got really green grass.
This has been done as a regular business/utility practice in the US for many years. Factories that are heavy users of one energy source will switch in the winter to an alternate source to free up resources for domestic heating needs.
so I got what was essential, whisky, rum and vodka plus a bag of crisps ( a man has to eat y’know) paid and made my way to the exit hoping to find a taxi. I did get one but he refused to take me to my door as he would have had extreme difficulty getting back out, so I hoofed it back.