From Nation of Shopkeepers:
Would all those moaning gits who have been chanting mantras along the lines of ‘I {live in / have just come back from } {Moscow / Canada} and they manage to cope with weather like this’ like to show me a cost / benefit analysis of providing an extreme weather capable infrastructure that will only be used once every 18 years against the proven cost of a day off work to the taxpayer, given they would be funding such an infrastructure?
Yup.
I once saw the capital of North Carolina buggered by one inch of snow. The municipal authorities released the schools early without first salting the roads; parents left work to collect their children. The resulting traffic jams were so bad that children whose parents got stuck had to sleep overnight in their schools, while news reports showed impromptu keg parties being held in the highways and the byways of the city.
Although I got home in a reasonable amount of time (45 minutes to travel three miles: not bad, considering), I only managed to do so by driving uphill on a grassy median and skidding over a bridge past a police car that was supposed to be blocking the lanes.
By the next morning, a freak wave of 20-degree temperatures had melted it all.
I was in a similar situation in the UK a couple of years ago. It started snowing in the afternoon, people decided to leave work early, the gritters got caught in this early rush-hour and everything just stopped. Only an inch of snow, but it took me six hours to go 11 miles. Many people slept on the M11.
One thing that I’ve noticed that is done in New York is parents get an early morning phone call if there was snow in the night and the school day is either cancelled (and added to the end of term) or put back two hours. Both these have the side-effect of reducing traffic for everyone else, at almost no cost. Not sure what the British teaching unions would make of adding days to the end of term, though.
As a teacher in Britain (though not, admittedly, a member of a teaching union), I would prefer not to add days to the end of the term or the school year. The year already goes to the end of the first week in July!
When I lived in Pennsylvania, briefly, we used the same system you describe in New York. It seemed to work fairly well. Perhaps it ought to be implemented here.