[BorgHunter]

> I wouldn't be that surprised to hear that Chicago was unable to clear snow from a 100-year snow event because the funds were mismanaged or something similar. That sounds entirely within character.

Former Mayor Michael Bilandic famously lost reelection in 1979 after botching snow removal following the large blizzard of that same year. Ever since, snow removal has been one of the city government's core competencies; even the quite intense Groundhog Day blizzard of 2011 was well-handled, though it managed to shut down LSD for a bit. There's plenty of mismanagement and corruption in city government to go around (the police department is famously corrupt and incompetent and shows no signs of turning that around), but snow removal is one thing that can generally be counted on here.

[ghaff]

Weather forecasting today is also much better than it was in the 1970s. The Blizzard of '78 in especially the Boston area would still be bad and the city might even still be largely shut down for a bit, but you probably wouldn't have the spectacle of mass evacuation from cars on Route 128 because the highway had literally ground to a complete halt.

[OldHand2018]

They actually studied the cause of Lake Shore Drive shutting down in the blizzard and found that it was because of a cascading series of cars and busses got stuck, preventing plows from reaching sections of the road. So they built removable median sections in strategic locations that allow snow plows to bypass traffic snarls and free up the road again.