"500 plows in the whole of the UK"

[randomness]

So, I just heard on PRI's "The World" radio news show that the United Kingdom has 500 snowplows for the entire country.

They gave no context for this number. The story certainly gives the impression that this is very few, but how many is a reasonable number? I don't know how many snowplows Massachusetts has, for example.

Leaving aside whether this is true, whether this number only counts plows under the control of the Ministry of Transport, or what... I still don't know how that number compares with places which get more snow.

I'm not blaming the show, as this was more or less an atmosphere piece about how England has come to a sliding, slippery halt because of the weather; but I am really wondering what a baseline number of plows is for a place that gets snow regularly.

Comments

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

For a while, at least, King County in Washington State had 2.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

I was about to chime in with this precise point, but I thought that was actually the City of Seattle, not King County. Pretty positive that's true, too—King County actually goes right up to the Snoqualmie Pass summit (to the great chagrin of some folks East of Issaquah who'd like to subdivide), so at the very least, somebody out that direction owns a bunch of snow equipment.

In any case, I think that's still close to true, but they went out and bought removable plow blades for a lot of the parks department trucks in the late 1990s, so they're not quite as hosed as they once were. In theory, anyway...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Back when Seattle was having all its snow clearance problems I thought it would be a very amusing hack to drive a Massachusetts Highway Department snow plow to Seattle and significantly increase the number of plows there.

"They told me to plow I-90 until I got to the end, starting in West Stockbridge, so I did. Man, that's a lot longer drive than I expected.

Looks like there's a lot of plowing to be done here. Where do you want me to start?"

It'd also be funny to take a few plow batteries to the UK and Ireland, except they drive on the other side of the road. That, and we're getting more snow today, so we need them ourselves.