Snow Day

For the record, it’s a ThinkProgress snow day today. Won’t keep me from blogging, but the general volume of political news should be slow with everything shut down.

A given quantity of snow has a much more severe impact on transportation and such in the DC area than it would if it fell on Boston or Chicago or Toronto. That makes sense—since big snowfalls here are relatively rare, the various municipalities don’t invest that much in snow preparedness. But it turns out that a day when non-functioning commuter infrastructure causes a federal government shutdown costs the taxpayers $100 million. Given those odds, it seems like it would make a great deal of sense for the federal government to pay for some investments—do something to make Metro more robust to snowstorms, for example. The way the system works now even two days after an enormous snowfall all of the above-ground stations are closed and even the below-ground stations in the core are running on massive delays.