Freezing rain is the storm that catches people out along the Central Avenue corridor — snow you can push, but glaze has to be salted and then salted again. Snow removal out toward the Colonie line covers driveways and parking lots, walkways and entrances, with ice control timed to the thermometer instead of the calendar. Capital District storms have a habit of starting as snow and finishing as something meaner, which makes the second pass matter as much as the first. Pavement taken down to the blacktop stays open; pavement cleared halfway becomes a rink by dusk. That difference is the entire trade, and it gets decided in the last twenty minutes of the job.