Snow Reveals a Different Form of Entitlement

Non-local readers, you may or may not have heard we had some snow here in Minnesota over the past few days. 

It was close to a foot and a half, falling inconveniently over more than two days, so it didn't mesh well with our cities' snow emergency timing. And it was heavy, wet snow, because the temperatures were close to the freezing mark, which would historically have been a bit unusual at this time of year. I hear this snow fall, which comes in at #15 in our local record book, is being called The Big Mess.

Anyway, public recriminations are flying about failures to get the snow cleared out of the streets fast enough. A Twitter writer, who I only recently started following, called the Pedaling Professor had this to say about it:

Watching Saint Paul drivers lose their minds at Saint Paul Public Works over one day of mostly minor inconvenience because of a huge snow storm is pretty wild. Like, you're handed everything on a platter all the time, every public space caters to you, and it's still not enough.

Every street and road is made almost exclusively for you to the detriment of everyone else. You never have to think about whether the route you're biking is safe, has bike lanes that already suck and then disappear. You have parking that's generally free every single place you go.

You never have to wonder when your bus stops running or whether the frequency is so low that you might have to wait an hour for the next one. Or whether there's a giant icy unplowed berm separating you from your stop. Or no place to sit with a little shelter from the weather.

You don't have to worry about or report unplowed sidewalks days after a storm. You don't have to hop over giant snow berms from plows or deal with sidewalks that just end and dump you onto the shoulder of an unsafe, poorly designed high speed roadway. 

When you look at the world from the point of view of someone who rides a bike instead of driving, or takes the bus and walks on sidewalks that are supposed to be cleared by the adjacent property owners, it's hard to have a lot of sympathy for people who can be warm inside a metal box on a snowy day. We live in Minnesota; there's winter. 

Get some perspective.