[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.