Maybe panic wasn’t the major factor in this case, but widespread driver panic certainly can be an exacerbating factor.
In Washington, DC (“The Northernmost Southern City”), which does get serious snow occasionally,* I’ve seen it a few times. Of course Washington traffic is also uniquely made worse by all the gigantic egos colliding.
Notable among those incidents was January 13, 1982, famously “the night the airplane fell on the 14th Street bridge.” It took us six hours to get about 20 miles home, and I saw people flat-out panicking. We’d tell drivers that a bunch of us guys were going to push them over an icy patch, and PLEASE don’t gun your engine and throw road salt and ice into our crotches…they’d nod, white-faced, as if they understood, and then gun that engine like a fighter pilot and throw road salt and ice into our crotches. I saw cars waiting to enter the road – a solid line of stopped cars ni front of them – gun their engines and spin their wheels, searching for traction that, if they got it, would instantly drive them straight into the broad side of the line of stopped cars a yard in front of them. Once when we were stopped – hundreds of cars in both directions – I walked forward to find nine strapping men and a Navy officer looking forlornly at one car that stuck out from the shoulder too far to get around. Although I was a kid, I had to be the one to organize them to push it a few feet onto the shoulder and so all that traffic could be moving again.
The snow that day was 4-8 inches. Yes, it came down fast; yes, it was unusually cold.
[QUOTE=Washington Post]
Light snow started falling in Washington during the early morning hours of January 13 as a fast-moving and moisture-laden storm approached from the south. By noon, moderate-to-heavy snow had spread over the entire area, and by early afternoon the snowfall rate was quite heavy.
There was a one-hour period during the early afternoon on January 13 during which the snow dropped visibility at National Airport to a sixteenth of a mile. Approximately 2-to-3 inches of snow fell during that hour. The snow ended abruptly in the mid-afternoon.
Prior to the storm, an extremely cold Arctic outbreak had spread across the eastern half of the United States, dropping temperatures to -25°F in Chicago and near 0°F in Atlanta. There was also a major freeze in the central Florida citrus groves. At National Airport, the mercury dropped to 2°F.
[/QUOTE]
from here
Bad conditions with little warning. But driver panic, selfishness, and dumbassery hugely multiplied the problems.
*A couple of years ago we got 29 inches one day – and 9 more the next day in a separate fall.
