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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2746900" data-attributes="member: 7240">Vancouver, where I grew up, doesn't get snow every winter but it still does a reasonable portion of the time. However, because Vancouverites nurture the pathological belief that they live in a Mediterranean climate and not in a rain forest, they are strangely shocked and paralyzed when snow does show up. For instance, we built a rapid transit system in 1986 that, for the first four years of its operation, shut down every time there was snow on the tracks. It had never occurred to its designers that it might snow.Similarly, Vancouver has a routine for what to do when it starts snowing. All the key businesses in the downtown core immediately shut down and tell their employees to go home (Vancouver has horrendously bad traffic planning at the best of times), instantaneously creating total gridlock, of a rush hour on steroids. This congestion prevents any of the city's snow-moving vehicles from reaching the bottlenecks that need to be cleared. As these bottlenecks fill with snow and cars with summer tires, the rush hour changes from a slow crawl to a dead stop as the various hills that one must cross to get out to the suburbs fill up with immovable cars and unsalted snow.</blockquote>