Snow - what snow?

Two inches of snow, and everything grinds to a halt - we've heard it time and again over the last couple of days, and we've had sound-bites and letters from people who have lived in Canada and Scandinavia and Russia and so on laughing at our inability to cope with, what to them, would be no more than a sprinkling of snow. Well of course, we could cope with it if we chose to do so, but the cost - initial and ongoing - would be significant, and you have to ask whether that would be a sensible use of resources for something which would be used for just a few days every decade or so. What I think would be more sensible, would be to have a regional or national plan for dealing with these occasional events. We could simply have declared a regional "non-day" for yesterday for example, and then nobody would have had to consider struggling to get to work - which many didn't manage anyway. We already do this sort of thing for schools - it's just an extension of the same idea.