maybe, but you better pay what it costs. For snows of 15cm or so you can plow whenever, but anytime there is around 50cm you need to keep everything plowed during the storm no matter how much equipment and manpower it takes, otherwise you fall far enough behind you can't plow and need equipment for mining to clear the snow, at great expense. If even once in 10 years a snowfall expected to be 10cm turns into 60cm you will more than make up all the costs of just treating every snow fall as 60cm expected.
I have no knowledge about snowplowing and I was just guessing that the cost of labor could be a factor. "Low-paying" jobs pay a lot better in Scandinavia than most other places. Most (basically all) people are payed a living wage from a single full time (37-40 hours) job. I don't even know if being a snow-plow driver is a "low-paying" job, and I would guess that those who drive the plows have other tasks as well.
I too know nothing about Sweden. In the US snow plowing for the public roads is fairly well paying. You do road repair in summer, and in winter plow snow.
Cost of labor is a factor, but it isn't the only one. As I said, you are far better of having enough to keep ahead of the worst possible case snowfall than less people who can handle only the normal snowfall and take weeks to dig out of the bad ones. And that is just the pure monitory costs of clearing snow and says nothing about the other costs to society from being slow to clear snow (emergency services for example)
Since they are prioritizing and doing one before the other, I would guess that either they need the same people or the same machines to do it. I would expect different machines for the two tasks. So it must be people? Right?
Anyway, I think their priorities are very sensible.
Different machine and different people both. There is no way around the fact that you need a lot of people to keep up with the snowfall, and falling behind is a lot more expensive in the long run.
You can make something a priority, but the difference must be limited because of the nature of the ongoing work (unless you de-prioritize the other to the point where snow isn't plowed at all)
