Snow has settled in Brighton and Hove this afternoon, sparking snowball fights and traffic chaos.
Buses have been abandoned on hilly roads and other routes have been shortened as vehicles struggle to cope with the suddenly icy conditions.
🌨️⚠️ Due to the weather conditions there may be changes to many of our routes this evening.
Please see https://t.co/CWJ9bwj3Cg for the latest information.
— Brighton & Hove Buses (@BrightonHoveBus) January 8, 2025
At 4pm, as the snow began to settle, Brighton and Hove City Council tweeted that it would be gritting the roads this evening.
Have you seen the snow? ❄
A yellow warning for snow is in place so please look out for yourself and others.
Our gritting teams will be out gritting the roads on major routes this evening. Remember, gritting doesn’t guarantee no ice!
Take care Brighton & Hove 💙 pic.twitter.com/t1p1WCaEbc
— Brighton & Hove City Council (@BrightonHoveCC) January 8, 2025
However, some roads are already closed, including Warren Road between Woodingdean and Elm Grove in Brighton and Hangleton Road and Court Farm Road in Hove.
The Met Office issued a yellow be aware snow warning on Monday, but most forecasts this morning were for heavy rain rather than snow for Brighton and Hove, turning to sleet in the early hours.
Here’s what the traffic map looked like just before 6pm. Zooming in showed that many of the roads leading to and from the main roads were also jammed.
Journey times were long as drivers slowed down for the treacherous conditions, some crashed or abandoned their vehicles and queues grew.
Sussex Police said: “The county is currently experiencing severe weather conditions with snow, ice and freezing rain.
This is particularly affecting the A23 and A27, Brighton and Hove and areas of East Sussex and we are responding to reports of multiple collisions.
“Please do not travel unless absolutely necessary. Listen to local radio for ongoing updates on weather conditions and road closures.”
Talk about shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted???
Grit too early and it washes away.
Usual story. 2 flakes of snow and the bus service stops. Bring back trolley buses. They could do the 46 route, snow or no snow. Including Ditching Rd.
Scandinavians must be laughing into their lagers. 1 inch of snow and its utter mayhem. People running away from their abandoned cars, buses which cant get up snowy hills (why dont they have emergency alternative routes?), collisions with trees posts other vehicles, calamitous reporting of awful apocalypse conditions, a miserable no of gritters with no idea when or where to deploy, reckless morons driving too fast or petrified drivers who shouldnt be out driving too slow, late braking, no lights, no idea of how to steer in a skid (not required driving skill), pathetic.
Absolute madness
Yep, my friend lives in Sweden and he had over three feet of snow over night not long ago! All the roads, buses, trains etc running as normal!
East Sussex County Council admitted they didn’t start gritting until 3.15pm today – and I can tell you by that time it had been sleeting on and off for an hour or more – and that was by the beach. We all know that snow settles on higher ground first, so the South Downs must have been collecting snow before mid afternoon.
When I drove out of Brighton at about 3.30pm the snow started coming down heavily and I can tell the roads were not gritted, and soon became treacherous.
I eventually turned back, and although I got home safely after a slow journey, the city kerbs were already full of abandoned cars and some had skidded off the road. It was weird to see that even the A27 didn’t seem to have been gritted. The problems started way before the school run.
The city buses were also badly affected, with many left abandoned in hilly areas.
These facts are enough to show how badly they got it wrong.
Surely we can’t allow the entire city transport infrastructure to close down in 2cms of snow?
I often read your comments and find them more measured than some others, but just a few days ago you were bemoaning the poor local forecasting in story warning of the gale which followed and which said we would have wintry showers, sleet and snow today. Another regular, Chris, joined in saying it was just exploitative content generation and crying wolf. Not me. I worked from home today. I know the warnings often err on the side of the worst case, but they serve a purpose and it’s right for newspapers like this to write about them. I just hope your generally moderate track record didn’t sway anyone to risk the treacherous roads this afternoon.
Well, thanks for the comment Mary, but my original comment – in another thread – stands. Namely that too many news sources concentrate on national weather forecasts without their local flavour on the detail.
For the record, I write local forecasts on several sites for water sports users, concentrating on coastal wind, sea breeze predictions, and likely waves. (I have done that for twenty years, so I have quite a following, as a local weather forecaster for windsurfers and kiters.)
But in the ‘old days’ a local newspaper would have a local angle on weather issues, in Brighton adding tide times and tide heights where they coincide with high wind, plus the likely chance of local flooding etc. Whereas all to often now we get the headline drama without the local detail, and it’s a repeat of a national warning. The concentration on weather headlines – at its worst in the Daily Express and the Mail – has left most people cynical when they hear the doom and gloom. And so some trust has gone, and we need to re-earn that trust with more specific forecasts.
In this case, the Met Office yellow warning for sleet and snow was very specific and actually this site’s reporting beforehand of that Wednesday forecast was very accurate if you read the wording.
It is also true that predicting snowfall is very difficult, especially where it will be short-lived. What actually happened today is that the air temperature initially sat at about 3degrees, and it looked like we’d just get sleet and rain, but then the precipitation came in harder and heavier than maybe expected, so the city’s roads were not ready. The phone weather apps didn’t mention much snow, and that’s because most are based on the (free, American) GFS system. If you switched your Met Office app to, say Devil’s Dyke as a location, then it would have shown snow.
I have never see the road chaos so bad as it was for the school run and for the commuting hours today, and my complaint would be is that the various road gritters took their time before responding to what was obviously starting to happen. And I think we’ll hear more complaints about that, over the coming days.
The real issue here is not with the forecast or the local interpretation of that, it’s instead that councils are so strapped for cash they seem to be prepared to gamble with road safety when the forecast is uncertain. Or maybe the Council staff too have become too cynical about alarmist forecasts. They are also wary of spreading grit and salt on rainy days, because it can quickly wash away if all we get is rain.
Council comments that the main roads were gritted. But with chaos on the A27, A23 and main routes within the city, were they? The bus status gives a good up to date view – and most routes have major issues. So something has gone badly wrong. The snow was forecast, under an inch and chaos everywhere! Were those responsible for keeping the main roads and bus routes open all working from home?
For a town like Brighton which probably snow once for a year or in 2 years this is totally unacceptable the council show be more prepared for so little snow wow get your act together Brighton and Hove City Council today looked like a Kindergarten Staff that had no measures calculated for today’s mayhem.
Completely agree. I was on a bus from Brighton to Saltdean, leaving at 4.00pm. It took two hours. No roads had been gritted. This is pretty basic stuff.