I grew up in Seattle. Non Seattleites do not appreciate that Seattle is built on hills and cold weather is extremely hard to predict here. In the Midwest or Great Lakes, snow means snow. In the Puget Sound, snow means snow or ice and slush on hills and all the right places to make walking or driving risky. When I was a kid we would try to be like mailmen and get to school while our parents would go to work no matter what. Eventually we collectively got tired of fighting the weather and decided it wasn’t worth it.
People that haven’t been just don’t appreciate how hilly it is and how rare significant snow is in the lowlands. When it does snow, it can dump a foot the density of wet cement in a short period of time which will either melt or refreeze into solid ice. The other issue is that the event that everyone is talking about is the 2nd major snowfall this week, and two more events (one larger than any so far) are forecast for later in the week.