Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many people don't though (look at how attendance rates plummet at schools and businesses on heavy snow days), and of those who do drive anyway, the accident rate is highly elevated.
I cannot relate to what you write at all. In all my years in school, I did not witness a single day of attendance drop due to weather (the only weather-related exception was for the early years of elementary school, when you could choose not to go outside during breaks if the temperature was low enough, but that was rarely the case here near the coast). What's more, in bad weather people (who have the option to choos…
I grew in a mountain pass area where there (used to, times change...) be heavy snow 2 to 4 months per year, and learned to drive there. Now I live in a city where snow happens regularly but much less and typically goes away in a couple of days, and when there's snow there's much less people on the roads, and for those who are, only a fraction know how to handle it, or even have proper winter tyres even though temperatures dive below the freezing point every year. People routinely flat out skip work on such days because "snow", which coming from where I grew up, is unfathomable unless you got a meter of snow overnight. On the occasional trip to Paris I've witnessed a couple events where emergency services are scrambling to bring water, food, and clothes to people gridlocked for hours (it was winter and many couldn't be arsed to take even a jacket, oblivious to their environment, living in their air-conditioned bubbles from house to covered parking lot to car to workplace); the entirety of the city streets was in deadlock because of a couple of millimetres of snow (obviously {rail,sub}way was unaffected). Pure madness.