
Why Sweden Clears Snow-Covered Walkways Before Roads - thecortado
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/24/why-sweden-clears-walkways-before-roads/
======
nugi
Coupling sexism to snow clearing order. I have now seen it all. This is
getting to be quite the stretch. The correlation is tenious at best from the
data they presented.

~~~
8bitsrule
Don't see that. This seems pretty clear, and (as usual for Scandanavia, unlike
almost everywhere else) rational:

"Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in
Sweden than while driving. And the cost of those injuries far exceeds the cost
of snow clearance."

------
Shalle135
Everyone knows that this is the next level of crazy. In the winter, people
don’t walk their kids long distances to kindergarden - they drive. And the
unlucky souls who walk, it never was a problem because it’s easier to put on a
better pair of shoes than to replace your car with a snowmobile.

Since this began there has been absolute chaos in society, last year people
was abandoning their cars on the biggest road in Sweden(E4) and walked home -
because the roads weren’t plowed.

More side effects of this was that all shipments were delayed which caused
billions in financial loss for the society, emergency personell was unable to
get around and people died, all buses and trains were cancelled.

~~~
eesmith
What would a change in the prioritization of how roads, bike paths, and
sidewalks are cleared cause all the trains to be cancelled? I thought the
trains had their own routes and own clearing equipment?

I tried researching this but nearly all the news in English is from the pro-
Trump/right-wing press using this to ridicule feminism.
[https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gender-equal-snow-
removal-...](https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/gender-equal-snow-removal-
procedures-left-stockholm-paralyzed) said the trains were running at half-
speed, which make me think that the feminist-based snow clearing policy wasn't
the main problem.

I did read that it was the biggest snowfall in 111 years - surely that played
a role as well, yes?

Almost all of the articles I found were published within a couple of days of
the event, and all referencing the same Swedish news sources. I didn't find
anything which described how many of the chaos was due to the different snow
cleaning prioritization and how much was due to the amount of snow. I imagine
other factors might also be important, like the amount of lead time in knowing
there would be that much snow, or if (since it was an early season snow)
people hadn't expected such a storm, and perhaps not yet switched to winter
tires.

No doubt the Swedish news all covered these details, but that doesn't help me
much.

