Personally I've always always bought budget summer tyres my whole life, never once used a winter tyre, and I'm in the north of Scotland. That said, I won't venture too far out of town when it is genuinely bad, so I'd say the rurals could be doing with winter tyres, but for the sake of a few weeks out of the year I'm gonna have to side with RM on this one. What I think RM should start doing though, is some form of driver training. I've worked with quite a few posties who aren't the most confident of drivers which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but when we do get a bit of snow and ice and the van slides a bit then they s**t themselves.
In fact I'd go one step further and say everyone should have to do a bit of skid car training to get their licence.
Almost as good as the office I heard about which got a Peugeot Partner Trek (i.e a Peugeot Partner with greater ground clearance), and it was only put on town rounds so that it didn't get damaged on any farm tracks!
