Reality, Meet Fiction: Transportation and Weather

Reality:

It's been a snowy winter here in the midwest and we aren't even in the depths of the season yet. This is the first year I've owned a car, so it's given me a new perspective on how weather affects transportation.

For college, I moved one state north. While we don't get terribly much more snow here than I did back home, peoples' attitudes are quite different. In my home state, we were regularly given updates on road conditions by county and the roads were sometimes completely closed to allow for the plow trucks to clear them faster. People tend to drive quite slowly and carefully. Mention of a snowstorm sends people running to the stores for bread and milk days in advance.

Here, people just charge out into the snow with seemingly no concern for their own safety. Snow plows are rarely seen (or used, from the looks of the roads some days). Traveling is entirely at your own discretion. Rather than using "rumble strips" (a textured strip of pavement that makes a loud noise when you drive over it) only on the sides of the road, they're present in between lanes/directions of traffic as well. And it's a good thing--you frequently can't see the lines on the pavement.

Fiction:

How can you leverage the intersection of travel and weather in your story? Does your character know how to drive on snow? Does the airport have de-icer for airplane wings? Do roads close down when it's snowy? Does the rental car come with an ice scraper to clear off the windshield? What are your characters' opinions of what weather is safe to travel in? Do characters in a certain region own different vehicles to make travel easier?

Of course, even space has weather. How do solar storms impact spaceflight? Does your galaxy have seasons of planet alignment that are more favorable for travel?