"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

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I think it's the "Private Contractors" that make snow-removal in MA work, and that makes a problem for other places... The state can't afford to (and would be foolish to) own and maintain the number of plows needed in case of the sort of snow load we get every 3 to 5 years. Talking out my ass, it would be easy to imagine that more MA residents own the medium- to heavy-duty pick-up trucks and other consumer-grade trucks capable of pushing a plow, than all UK residents combined. It's just a more common American-pastime, owning a big truck, than it is Brit, I think.

If you have a truck and a drive-way or garage, you can invest in a plow and get on the State call-list. It's kind of a brilliant system, even if the down-side is that it relies on our abhorrent love of gas-gusslers.

[chotii.livejournal.com]

When my family lived in Eastern Washington state and Montana, my father's pickup truck *always* had a plow blade he could attach in winter. He plowed our driveway, our neighbor's driveways, our entire road (Google Maps 'Bentley Road, Colville WA', and as like as not, keep the plow down all the way to town. Then he plowed out the business parking lot and sometimes other local businesses' parking lots. Or he delegated this to my brothers. I never did do it myself.

Stevens County would never have plowed out Bentley Road. It was then, and may still be, simply an oiled gravel road, and it didn't rate plowing by the county.

[redbird]

New York City handles this by attaching plows to the large truck fleet it owns anyway, which spends most of its time collecting household garbage.