Snow, Snow and More Snow
This Editorial appears in the Feb. 15 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
The mid-Atlantic region is the latest area to be reminded of Mother Nature’s capriciousness and unrelenting fury, as a seemingly endless string of major snowstorms has dumped record amounts from Virginia to New Jersey.
The two latest storms dropped some 4 feet of snow around Washington Dulles International Airport in the western suburbs of Washington, D.C., last week and raised the annual total there to a new cumulative record of 6 feet.
And by week’s end, forecasters were warning of another, although seemingly less powerful, storm that could reach the region early this week.
The snow, accompanied by fierce winds that helped qualify both of the latest storms as blizzards, led to many jackknifed tractor-trailers and prompted many big-rig drivers to pull over and wait for the sun to return.
But, despite the region’s general reputation as a place that doesn’t handle winter very well, life has somehow managed to go on. Most grocery stores were even able to keep pace with customers’ demands for milk and toilet tissue, products that seem to disappear first when forecasters predict snow.
And while the bad weather slowed the business of government to a crawl, the Senate finally unveiled its version of a new jobs bill that contains several things of interest to trucking late last week.
The bill, which includes billions of dollars to boost employment and help spur the national economic recovery, also includes a $19.5 billion transfusion for the beleaguered Highway Trust Fund. The fund, a primary source for highway construction money, has been ailing for years, since fuel taxes that feed it haven’t been raised in decades and receipts have been hit by the recession and recent increases in fuel efficiency of today’s cars and trucks.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Feb. 11 that the “the provision [in the bill] dealing with highways saves a million jobs.” And by doing so, it also keeps critical infrastructure improvements and repairs going.
We’re glad to see that Reid kept the highway-related provisions in the bill, since he trimmed many of the provisions in the original proposal that came forward from the Senate Finance Committee.
Unfortunately for the mid-Atlantic states — nearly all of which already are millions of dollars over their snow-removal budgets — there apparently are no provisions for snow relief in the new bill, although many details of the package were still unclear.
