Traffic snarl meaning

They may have the same meaning, but they are not what a native speaker would say. In BE we would say something like 'The accident held up the traffic for two hours', or ' . . . held the traffic up . . . '. Or 'The traffic was held up by the accident'. We talk about the traffic being 'snarled up' when there is a traffic jam, but not that something snarls the traffic. I don't think the word 'snagged' is appropriate here at all. Cross-posted. I have found the phrase 'snag traffic' on this newspaper's website and I assume it could be an American English usage: It is unclear if the bus was carrying passengers at the time of the accident. The accident snagged traffic across Canal Street for at least two hours, holding up a fleet of massive high-end yachts fresh from the New York Boat Show at the Javits Center. I've never heard it either. I'll go farther and say that it makes no sense to me. There is no meaning for snagged that I'm aware of that makes any sense in this sentence. I think it's just a simple error. The writer meant snarled but accidentally wrote snagged instead and no editor (assuming there were any) caught it. Although I live in the Midwest now, I'm originally from Southern California, so perhaps I share James' bias. Anyway, so long as "the" is deleted before "traffic," the sentence in post #7 sounds find to me. If a kitten can snarl knitting yarn, why can't an accident snarl traffic? What happens to SoCal traffic under those conditions is much worse than whatever ...

Hi guys, can you help me understand the meaning of "traffic snarl" expression in the text below? Thanks in advance Giuseppe "There Cheonggyecheon might have stayed, if not for serendipity and politics. Throughout the 1990s, a small group that included academics and engineers sought to uncover the waterway. They figured out how to manage the stream’s hydrology and mitigate the traffic snarl that might ensue when the highway and the road below, which carried more than 170,000 vehicles a day, were removed."