Really, good snow tires and ensuring your city spends enough money on snow plows and sand is best. Sand, because after a certain point salt no longer lowers the freezing point enough for it to be useful as a melting agent. In northern Ontario I lived in a city with several large mines. The ore transport trucks, combined with the occasional day above freezing destroyed the main roads in the city badly enough without tire chains, or studs. By the end of winter, the main roads are a total disaster and the city spends the rest of the year in construction mode trying to repair them The whole freeze-thaw effect, allowing liquid water to get into cracks in the road then expanding when it freezes, along with the heaving of the ground as it freezes, just completely destroys everything.
Puget sound has crowned roads so that runoff hits the gutters and doesn't stand. It means that when the roads do freeze, getting a little bit off to the side means you're in the gutter. It also almost never snows, emphasis on "almost." I believe the city of Seattle occasionally has four snow plows. What has happened twice in my memory is we had a ridiculous snowstorm and no snowplows, so the city council gets outraged and demands Seattle buys snowplows. Then it doesn't snow and the city council gets outraged and demands that Seattle sells these giant waste-of-money snowplows. The ironic part is there's this guy that basically arbitrages Seattle's stupidity. At least twice he's bought the snowplows at auction, stored them in a warehouse, then sold them back to Seattle at about 1000% profit within 18-24 months.
When I was going to University in NE Ohio, the city I lived in had maybe 4 snow plows - and it snows there EVERY YEAR, ALL THE TIME. I've never had so many snow days in my life. I never had a day off from snowfall in high school - just the occasional day that it was "too cold to go outside" so school was cancelled and we went sliding outside instead. I lived on a deeply suburban street in northern Ontario, and it often took the snow plow an extra day to get to us because they were busy with main roads. As a result, you just go used to driving in half a foot of snow. edit: the roads are sort of crowned in Ontario as well, but I don't think that the drainage system works as well - we just get lots of water on the road. Not hydroplaning bad, but big puddles, pedestrians beware bad.
We had 58" of snow in one evening once back when I was in 4th grade. They cancelled that day. Then two months later, we had 40" of snow but fuckin' hell we were not canceling again so we had to make it in for a 2-hour delay, and then went home 2 hours early because the snow was coming down some more. That was a school district that was not extending the school year.
Oh man, occasionally we'd have "Ice Days", where the roads were bad enough that the school bus companies weren't running, but you still had to go to school (total dumb bullshit, but that's another story). I'd get a ride in with my mom on her way to work anyways, so I'd get to school, there's be like 50 students and a bunch of teachers being all like "why are you heeeeere? go home kid, i wanna go home too." Looking back, that was probably one of my first realizations that my teachers were human, and just like me.