Weather forecasting is an inexact science (whereas predicting the climate a hundred years from now is easy), but the government-imposed freak-out over the predicted blizzard in New York City was something to behold. It used to be that Manhattan basically kept moving during any snowfall because the cars are constantly churning up the snow on the roads and store-owners and supers are constantly shoveling the sidewalks in front of their businesses and buildings. Last night, everything ground to a halt, not because of the snow, but because the state and city said so. I got an emergency text saying that all vehicles had to be off the roads last night around 9 p.m. and remember thinking to myself, “But it’s not snowing.” It had snowed about three inches during the day. Yet the subways were closed down by a snowstorm apparently for the first time ever, and Mayor de Blasio extended the vehicle ban to food-delivery bikes. Some of this is surely driven by the dire media coverage of weather — you could hear the deflation in the forecasters’ voices last night when doubt began to creep in about whether the apocalypse was really going to hit the city — and some of it is the precautionary principle run amok. But one would hope a little civic pride would come into play: We’re supposed to be New Yorkers, not Washingtonians.