Hello Pkondz and friends,
I've been slowly reading through the TR and enjoying it all!
As a Californian transplanted to Alberta - 16 years ago - I wanted to chime in with a detail regarding winters in cold and snowy places...
One thing I didn't see mentioned (so far... I'm on page 57) is dealing with two sets of tires for each car. The winter tires are designed for more traction on snow.
Anyway, here in Calgary, we usually get our first snowfall sometime between September 1 and mid-October. If we happen to be paying attention to the calendar and the weather, we will swap out the tires (or take the car into the shop and have them do it) around mid-October before the snow gets too bad.
We do not own tire chains. My brother-in-law once was driving in the Sierras in California when it was snowing, and he was super offended that they required him to put chains on his car.
In addition to winter tires, the city will put down salt or gravel or some combination on the streets. Salts will lower the freezing point of water so that more of the snow melts, but they only work if it's warm enough. If it gets too cold, then they put gravel down which gets packed into the snow to provide some traction.
Also, in Calgary, they don't clear the residential streets of snow. We just drive on the packed down snow until it melts.
And then hopefully the last worst snow is over by the end of March and we can swap our tires back to the summer tires sometime in April. We have to store the tires we're not using in the garage. (I'm not a tire expert, but my understanding is that the winter tires are softer than regular tires, and so you don't want to leave them on when you don't need to because they will wear out faster, but I'm not sure on that.)
My husband used to swap out the tires himself, but now that the cars all have tire pressure monitoring systems, we take the cars to a garage to have it done. That way when the TPMS throws an error code, the mechanic gets blamed.