Hacker News Reader

Comment by dtwest | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, it is actually hotter, it is actually colder, it's all of those things you sarcastically point out. Except being too small or dense, who told you that?

I'm from the American Midwest and I'm currently in Northern Europe. The difference is huge. The density issue of American suburbs is real, and the phenomenon is relatively rare globally. Go check out Google Earth. How do you not see it?

The weather is also more extreme in most places of the US than Europe. When Europeans tell people in Wisconsin to "just take an electric scooter to the metro station" they understandably laugh it off as ridiculous.

View on HN

That's true for the Midwest but not necessarily for Boston. The temperature range is a bit larger in Boston but German cities can also have >100F weeks in summer and several weeks of snow in winter.

Snow is fine, but Boston will get 3 feet of snow, then an hour of freezing rain, and the next day it will be 45F. Winter is chaos

And that situation would literally just be business as usual in somewhere like Bangor or Buffalo. In Boston it's an excuse for half the city to call out of work and the MBTA to run trains "whenever we get around to it".

It's probably not much of a factor any longer but, for many years after the "Blizzard of '78", everyone knew someone who had to be evacuated from Route 128 or who got stuck at work for a week. A decade or so later I remember a friend who had moved to Boston recently remarking to me that they had never seen a northern city where people were so paranoid when the first snowflake fell.

It definitely created a mindset of really wanting to get home (or just staying there in the first place) if any amount of snow was forecast. Of course, it doesn't help that traffic is pretty bad even in nominal conditions. Every few years you still end up with a 6 hour commute home situation for many people.

In Bangor or Buffalo there is very little "business as usual". Boston is far more dense and optimized with less slack in the system.

I bet that the activity in Boston when it is "shut down" due to weather is still busier than an average day in Bangor or Buffalo.

Both those towns are small fries compared to Boston. Why not compare it to the Arctic?

Boston in particular is full of people who think the weather is super extreme in the winter. It's mostly a cultural identity thing with a side of massholes being pansies. It's probably easier to pander to them than to tell them they're wrong.

Source: masshole who has has lived in places with harsher climates

Reply on news.ycombinator.com