Sounds like those cases in the city where people leave cars running and doors unlocked while shopping in gas station convenience stores.
ETA: If there’s a fear of turning off the car because of the cold, they should carry a second set of keys and lock the doors.
I no fan of Fox 2, but moving away from Detroit because of it seems a bit extreme. 
@anothernewbbaccount: I had a '77 Datsun 280Z and an '83 Sentra that you could pull the key out of the ignition after starting the car. Which was nice.
It totally was 15 years ago (I have a tendency to want to believe I am not as old as I am). I was temping at Apple off 183 and Duval. My shift ended at 11pm and at like 10pm (way after the ice had taken hold) they told us we could leave early, which was pointless so I stayed til 11. At one point, with traffic slowed to a crawl on the frontage road, I was stopped next to a guy who had gotten his SUV stuck diagonally on the shoulder. I had my window down and he looked at me and said “how do you drive in this?” and I was like, “put it in low gear and go slow” but all I could think to myself was “good luck backing up from a diagonal position on the shoulder to get back into stopped traffic on a sheet of ice”. I now work from home and luckily Austin hasn’t had an icing like that since but boy did that drive suck.
Kind of OT, but all the talk of leaving cars running reminded me of a story a colleague told me a while ago. He was hiking in Death Valley with his wife and 2 kids all day, or a few hours at least. On the way back to the parking area he realizes he doesn’t have the car keys and freaks out. He was a hot head, so I can imagine the scene. He said the whole family started retracing their steps and frantically looking all over the place for another hour or two. Finally they gave up and went back to the parking area, by now it’s been at least 6 hours. They figured they could get help there.
They find the car, keys inside, idling, just like he left it.
And that was a perfect parable of what it was like to work with him.
haha, this is Exhibit A of how people lower their humor standards when someone is saying things they agree with. This guy has grade C+ sarcasm-fu, let’s face it. Good on him for fighting the good fight but those suggesting he quit his day job to make funny videos are giving him poor advice. He’s funny for a weatherman but that’s a very low bar.
Something like that happened to me when I lived in Portland. I was in a two-wheel drive pickup and trying to get off the highway just as it started icing. I did a 360 approaching the exit and then another 180 and my driver side wheels picked up a little lip off the edge of the highway and I thought I was going to flip it and roll. Instead, the nose of my truck was pointed directly down a steep embankment. I gulped this huge anxiety ridden glob of thick saliva, and then hit the gas as I drove down the grass towards the on-ramp that was at the bottom. I went the wrong way on the on-ramp to get back on the street and drove off as if nothing happened. I think at this point after a handful of harrowing stories like this, I’m down to one or two lives left.
Actually it’s the point that idling a cold engine is much more harmful for the environment, the mileage and the engine itself than compared to idling a warm engine, I’m sorry that I didn’t make this clear enough. A warm engine on idle is well lubricated and idles on a lower rpm, while in a cold engine, the cold oil is not fluid enough to reach every nook and cranny and typically needs to idle on a higher rpm. So the point is to get the engine warm as fast as possible, while not overstraining it.
The law is not virtue signalling, it basically states that it is not allowed to let an engine idle unnecessarily, and generally stipulates that unnecessary noise and pollution must be prevented when motoring.
But you are very right, the most important thing is to avoid driving as much as possible, which comes down to organising our cities, towns and villages in a way that driving around in a car is not necessary, by having local amenities which are easily reachable by foot or bike, and making longer commutes by public transport that is quick, comfortable and affordable.
Under these circumstances you should consider installing a block heater (there are also non-electrical block heaters). Heats the engine and the whole car quicker than idling and doesn’t strain the engine. Modern block heaters are remote-controlled so you can start preheating the car without even getting outdoors. And the cost for installing it might pay off by increased longevity of your engine.
I stopped reading here and knew how this story went. 
One of the first things baby Canadians are taught is That Shalt Not Drive a 2WD Pickup or at least Thou Shalt Own Many Sandbags For The Back. With close to zero weight over the driven wheels, pickups a worse than any grocery-getter car in poor road conditions. Even with weight back there, a pickup is advanced mode in winter, so don’t feel bad about your experience.
It’s also likely that, being in Portland, you didn’t have the right tires and there was no salt, sand, or gravel on that ice. All those things matter a lot. Tires are the big one that winter newbies don’t appreciate. It’s not just having the right tread pattern- winter tires stay soft in colder temperatures and make a huge difference. Most people who buy SUVs because they think you need one for winter have just never put proper winter tires on a car (almost nobody does).
This might be a really hard concept for him to understand, but you don’t have to have snow on your car. You could park it in a garage, or live somewhere where it doesn’t even snow.
Wait, did he just weathermansplain to us?
Cool. That’s the kinda stuff people write songs about!
All true. When I moved to Vermont, I still had that infernal 2wd pickup, but did put many sandbags in the back, cinder blocks, piles of gravel, heavy stuff. One snowy February day in the late 90s, I was driving home after helping a friend install his solar panels. I came around a curve, down a slope to a straightaway. The bottom of the straightaway was, unbeknownst to me, a gigantic pool of slush. It did not look icy. Or snowy. At least not snowier than the road I had been driving on. As soon as I hit that slush, I started to hydroplane, even with the snow tires all around. I was going maybe 40 mph. Slow mo. I turned left. Nothing happened except more sliding. I turned right. I hit the brakes. I hit the gas. Nothing but zero traction. I slid hundreds of feet in a straight line on a shallow angle that gradually veered from the road. I nearly unbuckled and bailed out. I had time to. The cost/benefit analysis played through my head and I decided to stay put. All of a sudden SLAM! I nailed a telephone pole head on. All the shit in the bed of my truck flew forward towards the glass behind my head. Cinder blocks, sand, gravel, rocks, pieces of 2x4s, a shovel. The only thing that saved me from getting the back of my head smashed in by a cinder block was the fact that the telephone pole was on a slight embankment, which meant that the front of my truck rolled uphill a few feet before impact. This changed the angle of impact of the cinder blocks so that instead of crashing through the window, they shattered on the thin metal window frame. The dents were two inches deep from the sharp edges of the blocks.
I’m lucky to be alive after driving that old truck for the years that I did. It was totaled in that accident. The front was completely puckered in from hitting the pole. I cracked that pole, too, and the phone company charged my insurance $1500 for it! It stood there, wires still attached, but splintered and broken in half for about 6 months. I had to look at it every day coming home from work and relive the ptsd.
I went back to the scene of the accident that summer after the pole had been replaced with a new one. Nailed to the stump of the one I destroyed was a gigantic, antique horse’s snowshoe with the square nails still in it. I pried that horseshoe off and kept it as a good luck charm.
That’s not the only car I’ve totaled. I’ve got more stories of my bad/good luck.
Suffice to say, I no longer drove 2wd cars and trucks after that. From then on, it was AWD Subies with studded snows that I put on in winter. You are 110% on the money about that.
I don’t live in snow country anymore, and sometimes I do miss the bobsledding around on the roads. It really teaches you to feel the car, the road and the conditions. People hate being a passenger when I drive because I go at it like Mario Karts.
Edit:. Post Traumatic Stress is NO TRIFLING MATTER. I suffered for a few months after that slow motion crash into the phone pole, replaying it incessantly, thinking I could have done differently. I could not. And try as I might to rationalize, it was not rational due to the nature of a disorder, and the PTS did eventually lift and not become PTSD. My heart goes out to all those suffering with this illness/disturbance/affliction. I had but a taste, and it was more than enough for a lifetime. I can hardly imagine what some people must go through after severe trauma. I’m sorry. Big hug.
No, only weathermansplaining to lazy a-holes in Detroit metro. So, you know, relax if you live somewhere else.
I should put my 20 years of shoveling Michigan snow on my resume. Strike that, I have no interest in going back.
I grew up in northern Canada, and tried several snow-removal tools, with varying results. By far the most effective was moving to Australia.
In my teens, I rolled a car after sliding on snow and ice.
When I was all grown up, I was telling this tale to a work colleague. He was an ex-soldier. I mentioned that at the time, I felt completely cool and collected. I opened the door, stepped out, and flagged down another car. Felt alert, but not frightened. Most people find that puzzling, given that I’d just gone for a ride in a tumbling car. But the ex-soldier didn’t bad an eye. He calmly asked “when did it hit?” “Next afternoon, in a movie theater. Nothing on the screen that would’ve reminded me about a crash. It just hit, and I would’ve collapsed if I hadn’t already been sitting down.” He calmly nodded.
Yes. Same here. Glad you brought this up. When it hit me, it was another ton of rocks slamming into my head.
Icy calm with the crash, fine that night. Next day, my wife and I are in a yoga class. I am doing fine through 30 minutes of the stretches. Then, it gets quiet for the meditation at the end. My mind kicks it up into high gear, full blown flashbacks on repeat mode. Heart rate shoots up. Breathing heavy. Mind becomes an absolute reeling mess. I jumped up, grabbed my mat and booked it out of there. I had to pace the halls. My wife came to find me and I explained what was happening: she knew what it was, but I didn’t. I needed a few months of therapy to get through it. It HIT. Just like you described.
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