Chicago budgeted $20 million for 2014 to plow snow and salt roads, but it has already spent $25 million. City crews are filling potholes at double the rate of last year — which means buying twice as much patching material for that purpose — yet drivers are still doing what look like drunken swerves to avoid yawning gaps in the streets. So far, according to the National Weather Service, the city has had its third-snowiest and fourth-coldest winter since the service began keeping track in 1872.

Pennsylvania has used road salt at a pace 24 percent ahead of normal, an additional cost of more than $8 million so far, and on Thursday, Gov. Tom Corbett deployed elements of the National Guard to help with an emergency response, which means another expense. Maine’s Department of Transportation ordinarily spends about $15.7 million a year clearing roads of snow, but “right now we’re already up to $21.8 million,” said Ted Talbot, a department spokesman. “If it continues along this line, we’d have to curb some spring maintenance, like tree trimming, some signage potentially.”

Detroit — the largest American municipality ever to enter bankruptcy, and yet to exit it — was already suffering from an aging, neglected infrastructure; Darryl Latimer, deputy director of the city’s Water and Sewerage Department, said that after a wave of retirements, the department’s staff, like the budget for water main repair, was not up to the job. To those burdens, this winter added persistent subzero temperatures and heavy snow, contributing to about 500 water main breaks in January, compared with about 300 a year earlier, forcing the city to hire outside crews to try to keep up.

The major break last week in Detroit, in a pipe dating to about 1890, sent water gushing through gaps in the pavement in front of a grocery store, and submerged streets in a 12-block radius to a depth of as much as two feet. A police car was among those stranded until a front-end loader pushed it out of the water, an officer still inside.

It took hours to shut off the flood and pump out most of the remaining water, Mr. Latimer said. “We had to tow some of the cars out of the way so we could get to our manholes,” he said, and even then, the valves controlling the flow of water had frozen.

Cold weather is tough on water systems because as the water chills, metal pipes contract. At the same time, frost and ice cause the ground to expand, adding pressure.

In addition to the direct costs to governments, harsh weather can also mean lower tax revenue by slowing economic activity. A downtown Syracuse water main break on — no kidding — Water Street left a deep crater in front of the Miss Syracuse diner, surrounded by Water Department barricades. “It doesn’t appear to be a lot,” the owner, Joe Todisco, said of the business he has lost, “but it’s a lot to me.”