The Snow is coming! The Snow is coming! If you are a driver in NYC that parks on the street, you have probably dug out your car more than a few times. With snow storms of this magnitude, it’s no small feat.

But there is a trick that I’ve picked up over the years. Always park on the left side of the street, not the right. You’ll be happy you did.

Since I quantify everything, I am going to make a fake attempt to quantify why this is. I looked Google Images on “NYC Snow Plow”. Despite the prevalence of oneway streets in the city, of the first 18 images of snow plows, 17 of them push snow solely to the right. Only one seems to be plowing down the middle.

That makes a whole lot of sense because on a two-way street, you don’t want to push the snow into the middle. So do yourself a favor and park on the side of the street that the snow is being pushed away from.

Note that I wish I could quantify the snow plowing in NYC for real, but sadly our city’s snow plow tracking website PlowNYC does not provide underlying data. I hope, in the spirit of Open Data, this will change soon. Until then, this is about the best I can do. Be careful out there!

Update: Redditors seem genuinely upset about my lack of clarification that this is for one-way streets. I thought it was vacuously true since In my eyes you can’t park on the “left” side of a two way street. But I guess many disagree with that. I hope that clarifies things!