UK weather

[Martin Naef]

Hi Micke

Mikael Hansson wrote:
> He he, the pics I've seen looks like a bad (in the sense of too little 
> snow) swedish winter but if it's not so common I can see that it has 
> more impact :)

Absolutely. The amount of snow is definitely nothing to worry about if 
you're used to dealing with it. But here in the UK, people aren't (ok, 
the Scottish Highlands might be different). For a start, everybody in 
Switzerland has a shovel in their garage to clean the driveway, council 
trucks can be equiped with snow ploughs, and I assume farmers are 
contracted as well to clean the streets with their tractors. So it needs 
to snow really badly before the roads become difficult to drive on - 
especially given that everybody has a different set of tyres for the 
winter. Same for public transport: the train services have snow ploughs 
as well, points have integrated heating to keep them functional even 
under low temperatures.

But: If you get a touch of snow once a year, and a couple of inches once 
a decade, there's little point to have such a massive infrastructure in 
place. On the other hand, I'm surprised how badly the Scottish roads 
cope with a bit of rain - massive puddles everywhere causing huge 
delays. It's not like rain would be the exception...

Martin

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