Negative, for sure. Cars don't start, accidents and illnesses are more common, carbon monoxide poisoning increases, heart attacks are more frequent with stress and snow shoveling. Throw in SAD and vitamin d deficiency - cold places throw a lot of shit at people.

My father used to cross country ski to work on the worst winter days. Sometimes he’d go on a drift right over stuck cars. Unexcused absences just weren’t a thing back then.

People wait for the major river separating Minnesota and Wisconsin to freeze up so they can drive across the frozen surface to their respective jobs and save 15 minutes on the commute via the bridges. It's a popular thing to do especially for Andersen Windows workers.

FWIW it's the Mississippi, but your description is probably more valuable given your point. (Though I think it's wild that people drive across the Mississippi, and I grew up just southeast of there in Rochester!)

Actually it sounds like he's referring to the St. Croix River. Andersen Windows is/was located in/near Stillwater.

Oh hey, I'd clean forgotten about that one! Thanks for pointing that out!

I feel that’s much less common now that the new bridge is in place; the old Stillwater bridge would often be broken or jammed up with traffic.

It mostly had to do with cars needing more maintenance, low income folks buying used cars, not having backup transportation (i.e. one car per family) when problems arise, and not having the funds to fix them.

Automobile use in the rust belt is so ridiculously wasteful, it no doubt generates heaps of jobs in the process.

I used to work as a mechanic in IL back in the day. It became normal for myself and my gearhead buddies to keep winter beaters and leave the nicer cars/motorcycles parked until the roads stopped getting salted and rain could wash it all away for summer. I'd go through winter beaters like they were shoes, whole used cars!

The amount of time and money I used to spend on automotive expenses back there is batshit crazy compared to what I spend in CA.

And the yearly rebuilding of all the roads trashed by the salt+plows. I wonder if it's less of an issue now with climate change.

1) Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

2) Roads in Minnesota are not destroyed by salt + plows. Roads are destroyed by frost heave and by heavy trucks traveling on them as the ground freeze gradually melts in the spring. Locales in Minnesota have "road restrictions" in the spring to try to minimize the latter effect - that is, dump trucks/semis are limited to about 50% capacity per axle to try to minimize the damage done to the roads they drive over.

> 1) Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

If only the primary corrosion problem on automobiles were the painted unibody, which still is only a minor scratch or collision-repair away from devolving into the same rotting trash.

Especially with newer vehicles employing more aluminum parts, often fastened using steel fasteners if not to steel surfaces, you get plenty of galvanic corrosion at these critical junctions. The dissimilar metals exposed to saltwater electrolyte is basically a battery. And this is occurring out of sight unless you get under and wrench on your own vehicles, where there's substantially more exposure to the road salts.

>Cars have had baked-on finish for 20+ years and generally don't rust through anymore, even with the ice melt put on roads in Minnesota;

It's better than it used to be but anything in the same plane as the tire rotates is still doesn't last. Rust also starts at the holes in panels where plastic trims attach and it's not uncommon to find 5-10yo vehicles that are missing large chunks of the rocker panels or areas around the rear perimeter under the bumper cover. Anything that routinely sees a gravel road will be destroyed in half the time.

Illinois road construction tends to be optimized for repeat business and just barely avoiding the ire of local news.

That sounds like some impressive engineering.

>I wonder if it's less of an issue now with climate change

It's roughly as bad, some years are worse than others. Climate change hasn't made winter better.

If you live in California, climate change has made winters in the midwest _appear_ more mild.

By my teens it was already apparent that IL winters were becoming less snowy, but it was still a slushy+salty mess on the roads.

I still have contact with friends back home and the impression our convos leaves me with is that they're out riding mountain bikes in the winter months my childhood would have had me sledding in a snowsuit.

But maybe it's just irregular and there's lots of icy/slushy road days. I admit I don't pay attention to the weather forecasts back home, it's just passing conversations with old friends combined with what seemed like a trajectory towards increasingly mild winters before I left the state.

How so? All I can figure is winter is supposed to be cold and snowy so California only hears about the extremes like a 60F day in January

Because Californians, being more liberal than average, are more likely to buy into the climate change narrative. Confirmation bias does the rest.

But anyone actually "buying into the climate change narrative" knows that the result isn't warmer winters.