Snow Effect on Transportation? Slow, Slow, Slow

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Getting around has slowed down in Central New York’s bad weather.

Highway traffic slowed to a crawl and many drivers have collided with each other or the ditch. Some buses made detours, leaving many bus-riders waiting in the cold. Amtrak train schedules changed. Some flights stopped. And much of that is raising costs to local governments in paying overtime for coping with the bad weather.

The villain in all this is the record snowfall so far this winter. “There’s much more snow than what was expected this winter,” said David Nicosia of the National Weather Service in Binghamton. “We are over the normal snow amount by four feet.”

Between Dec. 4, 2010, and Feb. 2, 2011,  Hancock International Airport had of 124.3 inches of snow. That compares to 69.9 inches of snow in the same period last year.

For drivers, said Sgt. John D’Eredita at the Onondaga Country Sheriff’s Office, the months of December and January called for extra caution on the road. “There were 666 motor vehicle accidents in December and 478 motor vehicle accidents in January,” said D’Eredita.

Many drivers, said D’Eredita, had lost control of their wheels on ice and slipped off the road. No one died in the snow-related accidents. But people were injured in 158 of the accidents, said D’Eredita.

For bus riders,  this winter season was not much different from the previous one, said Casey Brown, spokesman for CNY Centro. “We run in Central New York. We are used to snow,” said Brown.

But buses traveling along steep hills had to take the snow routes, he said. Among those buses that had to take a detour were Centro’s 20 James/Sunny Crest and 66 Grande Avenue , Brown said.

Some buses also couldn’t open their rear doors because of the high snow bank at bus stops. “Those buses ran 10 or 15 minutes behind schedule,” said Brown.

For Amtrak passengers, the recent bad weather has sometimes meant having to wait hours to get on a train. And some passengers had to check back another day. “We did a lot of shifting around” with schedules,” said Christina Leeds, spokeswoman for Amtrak in Washington, D.C. Many passengers had to get on a different train at a different time from what they had reserved, she said.

The snow limited the number of trains that could run in some parts of the country, she said. In January, Amtrak cancelled services once between Albany and New York City. But this was because of record setting freezing temperatures, Leeds said. Passengers leaving from Syracuse faced some delays and many of them had to re-schedule their trips, said Leeds. But no trains were cancelled from Syracuse, she said.

For airline passengers, dozens of flights recently were cancelled at the Hancock International Airport . But the cause was snow in other places, not in Syracuse. Snow storms elsewhere had shut down many popular destinations around the country.

“Planes out of Hancock most often head to Chicago or Detroit,” said Christina Reale, spokesperson for the Syracuse Department of Aviation, which oversees the airport.  Many of the destination-airports were forced to shut down, she said. “Many of them don’t have the tools to clear the runways in extreme weather conditions,” said Reale. This left planes at Hancock nowhere to go, she said.

For the cost of all the snow-clearing,  the transportation department of Onondaga County has paid for almost 20,000 hours of overtime for December 2010 and January 2011, said Brian Donnelly, the department’s commissioner. That’s up to $500,000 overtime pay for snow plowing county roads.

“We’ve already used more than half of our budget for the winter season just on overtime,” said Donnelly. But the transportation department’s budget is in good shape as long as snow falls stay light for remaining winter months, he said.

Fat chance, according to David Nicosia of the National Weather Service. He predicts more snow in Central New York. For the weekend of Feb. 5 alone, he said, “There could be up to 7 inches of more snow just this coming weekend.”

(Kelly Kim is a senior dual major in broadcast journalism and international relations.)

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