Re-read my past posts…If you live in an area around the Great Lakes and get lake effect snow, then you may be a candidate for needing snow/winter tires. But most people in the northern states don’t live in those extreme snowy areas. I use to, but haven’t in over 35 years. I can count on 1 hand the number of times I had to drive on snow during my commute in the past decade. Boston area doesn’t get that much snow…and it’s the 10th snowiest city in the US.
Driving on winter tires in winter conditions is far from 100% safe.
Even in sunny dry conditions, driving is likely the riskiest thing any of us will do in a given day, so some of us like to do what we can to improve our odds of making it through the day collision-free.
That’s not nearly as paranoid as you make it sound.
WI and MN are on the Great Lakes. I now live in Duluth, MN which has steep hills like San Francisco and snowfall at times like Buffalo. Michelin winter tires got me home from (flat) Superior, WI a number of times over the years.
My first-year winter experience with the car and its OEM all-seasons was bad. With winter tires it’s been quite good for 20 years now.
Boston, IIRC, is pretty flat, but even there drivers sometimes have uphills that are a no-go unless the tires are adequate. Winter tires are more likely to be adequate. The cost-benefit analysis is for each driver to evaluate, if they want to.
You have to travel a hill to get to my street…and wife has no problem what-so-ever traversing the hill during winter. A few times (maybe 3 in the past 20 years) she said her car was slipping a little, but didn’t have a problem making it on the unplowed road. In my experience…knowing how to drive in snow is 90% of the battle.
That’s for sure.
Near the high school where I used to teach, there was a road with a hill. Not extremely steep, but a hill all the same. Every time that it snowed, it was inevitable that there would be at least one car (almost always a Monte Carlo, for some reason…) in a ditch.
One day, I got a bird’s eye view of what some clueless drivers do. As I watched from a stop sign on the intersecting road, a woman approached that snow-covered hill, and suddenly slowed to a crawl. After a few hundred feet, she hit the gas hard, her rear tires spun violently, and because she had no winter driving skills, she wound up in that same ditch.
Go figure…
In the snow belt, if we could put good all-seasons on all the cars, we’d see a big drop in weather-related accidents. If we took all those cars and put on good winter tires, we’d see an additional drop. Not as big as the first drop, but there would still be fewer accidents.
Skilled winter drivers in many areas can deal with most situations without winter tires. But how many drivers fit that description?
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We had a little snow storm here last Wednesday just before the morning commute. On I-93 between Salem NH and Manchester NH there were about 20 vehicles involved in accidents. According to the police every one of them was because of excessive speed.