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Comment by IdoRA | Hacker News Reader

I’ve lived here for decades, so I am very familiar with the weather here—I am of the opinion that it was an unusual volume of rain leading up to the snowfall, rain all night before transitioning to heavy snowfall early AM where I am.

Closing the freeway feels like a good idea, but then you’d have ~130,000 cars/day traveling on surface streets? The Rappahannock doesn’t allow for many crossings other than 95.

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What happens is you close the freeway, it makes the news that its a bad storm and the freeway is closed, you call your boss (or if they are any good they'd call you) and say you along with everyone else is not going in, your kids aren't going to school, and the truckers sleep in their trucks at the gas station for the night. Then by the next day, or whenever the storm is over, roadworks will have had enough time to clear it off and salt it. That's how its done where it snows in other states.

I don’t see how you can stop, for example, the flow of Rt. 17 truck traffic onto I-95 diverting to the surface streets. Something like 75% of the 95 traffic in the affected section is not local. How do you ensure that they not use 95 and also not use the surface streets (which in this area are absolutely not capable of handling their current traffic, let alone overflow from the highway)?

You would divert them to some surface streets like 15, 1, 301, 66. You'd ensure they not use 95 by putting up a sign on the onramp that says road closed and you'd leave it unplowed while you focused your efforts on keeping other routes clear. Many trucks would probably just lay up at a gas station.

Are you familiar with the area? I’ve been here since ‘89. Those streets cannot handle the volume of traffic we’re talking about. There aren’t enough gas stations for the truck volume we’re talking about either.

There simply wouldn't be the normal volume of traffic on the roads if that interstate was closed. People would call off work and not drive to schools. The local roads will do fine with the remainder of people who absolutely cannot get off work during a blizzard, probably emergency workers. Plenty of major interstates that see huge volumes of traffic endure closures and the local community just responds accordingly.

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