I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
Southern Georgia, USA.
This is more of a regional rationalization about occasional weather hazards. Here in coastal Georgia, we get snow from time to time, about a half an inch to two inches once every three to five years. There’s a lot of people from colder climates that move here for work or retirement; they hear “a possible light dusting of snow” on the news or from a weather app and think that means nothing. Where they’re from it’s just normal, happens every year and there’s often more. They’ll even laugh at us for shutting down the schools and staying home from work for freezing rain. Here’s the thing: no one here knows how to drive in snow and will likely only see black ice a dozen times in their lifetime. Further, we have no salt/sand trucks, we have no plows, we have zero civic infrastructure to meant to deal with our very occasional ice storm or light snow. It happens so infrequently that there’s no way to justify spending taxpayers’ money to prepare in that way for those kinds of situations. So we shut down the schools and most businesses for a day or so and everyone mostly stays home. We’re not necessarily unprepared for winter weather, we just prepare in a different way that makes sense for the situation.
I mean, driving in two inches of unploughed snow isn’t a big deal where I’m from but that’s - as you mentioned - where everyone has winter driving experience, but also winter tires.
It’s also that the roads aren’t treated and won’t be treated. Y’all are used to de-icing (or whatever it is) to help clear up all the frozen patches. We got 3.5 inches overnight like five years ago and, in some shady spots, the roads had ice for days afterwards.
Same in central Texas. Moved here from a northern state. It’s much different driving on an icy salted road than an icy road with no salt. Cars don’t rust though. Trees aren’t used to it either, and drop tons of branches if we get freezing rain, causing vehicle and home damage and power outages. The energy grid and water systems aren’t made to handle cold weather either. Though, the energy grid and water systems can barely handle hot weather and droughts.
I don’t wanna sound insensitive but being unprepared killed a couple of Texans during that horrible blizzard, no?
Yeah, I remember reading about a whole family dying because a mother was running her car for heat in a closed attached garage. So, everybody died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I’m sure there were more deaths. Most people have all electric houses, so can’t heat or cook when power goes out. I was without power or water for about a week, but had a gas stove and drinking water stored (became a kinda “prepper” when covid first started).
I never understood the mentality of “it only happens every couple of years so we’ll never prepare for it” It’s not like Georgia is spending that money on other public services like railways
The simple math of it is it’s that it’s just cheaper to have some snow days.
Right! Also I would rather our state, counties, and municipalities spend their emergency prep dollars on things that actually hit us hard and often… like hurricanes. We might not be ready for what Wisconsin considers a laughably small amount of snow, but those cheese heads have no idea what even just a Cat 1 named storm can do in just six hours.