SALT LAKE CITY — Utahns are feeling thankful to be moving so easily on the roads after Wednesday's traffic catastrophe during the evening commute.
The trouble in which some drivers spent hours getting home from work is all anyone is talking about.
"It was bumper to bumper," said commuter Aisa Spencer. "No movement. It was awful."
The snow squall tripled, even quadrupled commuting time for those on northern Utah roads.
"It took me about three hours," Spencer explained. "It was stop-and-go traffic, sometimes it wasn’t moving at all. Normally it takes me thirty minutes."
Drivers said they were lucky if they made it up to five miles per hour.
"When you were parked, you could see where your car was parked as you moved forward to the next person in front of you because there was so much snow coming down around, and it was just snowing so fast," said Candace Boyt who got caught in the storm.
The Utah Department of Transportation says Wednesday's intense snow hit at the worst time.
"In a situation like last night, you have thousands of cars that are out there. So the plows are stuck behind all those people that are stuck behind whoever has slid off, or just the generally slow traffic because of the weather," explained UDOTs John Gleason.
UDOT believes they were as prepared as they could be, but reminded the public that the responsibility of an efficient traffic flow doesn’t solely lie on them.
"We saw a lot of people that were driving on bald tires, their vehicles weren’t equipped to be driving in a storm like that," Gleason added.
The traffic mess should be a wake up call for ahead of more storms this weekend.
"When they ask you that you should probably go home early, you definitely want to go home early," insisted Boyt. "Had I left at four o'clock, I would’ve been fine, but I chose to leave at my normal time at 5, and just in that one hour it made it pretty treacherous."
Everyone, include plow crews in the Salt Lake Valley are getting a much needed break Thursday night, but Gleason said preps for Friday’s weather forecast are already in the works.
