IdoRA

In addition to those, I also like to cook in donabes: I use a portable butane stove. I don’t think you’re missing anything, even if you could get an induction setup to work you have to make too many compromises to make it worthwhile.

You do need to be careful using carbon steel on induction, at least until you get the hang of it: the instant heat makes warpage easy to encounter, especially if the coil is undersized relative to the pan (US portable hobs have tiny diameter coils).

If you’re willing to use a cast iron wok, Lodge makes one with a flat bottom on the outside but curved on the inside. You have to make some major technique concessions, but it will work on induction, and if you use a butane torch while flipping food you can almost get a wok hei going.

This has sort of been my experience with induction beyond woks too, it often requires technique and equipment concessions. Great for boiling water and sautéing though. The tops also have durability/longevity issues when compared to gas and that isn’t usually acknowledged.

Are you familiar with the area? I’ve been here since ‘89. Those streets cannot handle the volume of traffic we’re talking about. There aren’t enough gas stations for the truck volume we’re talking about either.

I don’t see how you can stop, for example, the flow of Rt. 17 truck traffic onto I-95 diverting to the surface streets. Something like 75% of the 95 traffic in the affected section is not local. How do you ensure that they not use 95 and also not use the surface streets (which in this area are absolutely not capable of handling their current traffic, let alone overflow from the highway)?

I’ve lived here for decades, so I am very familiar with the weather here—I am of the opinion that it was an unusual volume of rain leading up to the snowfall, rain all night before transitioning to heavy snowfall early AM where I am.

Closing the freeway feels like a good idea, but then you’d have ~130,000 cars/day traveling on surface streets? The Rappahannock doesn’t allow for many crossings other than 95.

Part of the reason there is unusually high traffic in that location is the confluence of two things: one is that local traffic doesn’t have a great alternative to 95 over the Rappahannock river (the local Rt. 17/1 interchange is famously awful) so you take 95, and the other is that there is a large amount of truck traffic between Rt. 17 and 95. Basically over the span of the Stafford/F’burg area 95 sees an additional ~30k cars/day. There are road improvements in progress but they are too little, too late.

I lived in Rochester. At least when I was up there, there may have been a hundred inches of snow in the year, but there was rarely fresh ice. This storm delivered a sheet of ice with snow on top, and because of the earlier rain, you couldn’t pre-treat the roads. How does the northeast deal with those conditions, other than people being smart enough to stay home? How do plows remove ice when the roads can’t be pretreated? I’m very, very open to the idea that VDOT is doing a bad job with winter road maintenance, but “more plows” isn’t a convincing improvement plan for the wintery mix seen here.

Does increased numbers of plows allow you to clean this portion of road quickly enough to keep it navigable? The main issue is that the road is a sheet of ice, so as I understand it you really need chemical treatments, not just snow removal (although snow removal should certainly help). And does the density of cars pose a unique problem? The F’burg portion of 95 sees around 130,000 cars/day pre-pandemic.

In this case, a major issue was that the weather was rain transitioning to heavy snowfall. VDOT couldn’t pre-treat the roads because the rain would wash it away, and they couldn’t clear the roads of snow fast enough to prevent ice formation. Similar to the Atlanta “snowmageddon” in 2014, once you have enough 18-wheelers stopped, they can’t start moving again on ice, and they (plus the normal car traffic) clog the roads enough that the snow trucks can’t operate. I am having difficulty envisioning how a hypercompetent northeastern DOT could do better in these circumstances, other than improved communication.