I take issue with this view at the beginning of the article:
> They need salt. And not the kind of salt that flavors our food, but the kind that melts snow and ice. If we don’t have salt, no one can drive, because salt is what keeps our roads manageable.
Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education.
I may be wrong, but I heard that in certain Scandinavian countries (e.g. Norway) being able to control a skid is part of the driving test.
Driving in snow/ice, even snow/ice that is at the melting point and therefore extremely slippery due to the water, is absolutely possible without salt, but it requires your 'average Joe' to understand that they need to slow down, to leave 10* the space from the car in front, etc.
As many have noted, salt negatively impacts aquatic ecosystems, and also decomposes your shiny new car into a pile of rust.
Any situation that can be permanently resolved by education and intelligence, rather than by brute-forcing a constant 'workaround', would seem to me to be the best way forwards; but as is often the case, stupidity, laziness, resistance to change, and those who provide the salt being scared of the loss of revenue, win out...
> Driving in snow/ice, even snow/ice that is at the melting point and therefore extremely slippery due to the water, is absolutely possible without salt, but it requires your 'average Joe' to understand that they need to slow down, to leave 10* the space from the car in front, etc.
Which means the highway has 20 times less carrying capacity because everyone is driving half as fast with ten times as much space between each vehicle, and your one hour commute becomes 20 hours. This is equivalent to the roads being unusable.
Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education.
Can you elaborate on what the education would cover? My experience driving in the midwest for 30 years has been that if at any given moment, physics decides you, even as an abundantly cautious driver are going for a slip and slide, you're going for a slip and slide.
A sliding car doesn't have to be an uncontrollable car. When it's only snow on the road, it's just a bit of sliding here and there, but most drivers can still drive safely.
I consider myself a highly skilled driver but I agree that when there's a mirror-like icy spot hidden under the nice fluffy snow on top, and you hit it at the wrong moment, you're just going.
It doesn't answer my question though. What kind of education, besides the education we already give about being a safe driver is the kind of education needed to be "good" at driving on snow and ice?
Asking as someone who is reaching a point where training a younger human how to drive is about to be a thing, and I'm always curious what others think of how to drive in this mess.
I've got all kinds of strategies and tactics passed down from my old man, and you know what? After researching I learned that almost all of them are orally traditional wives-tales and actually have more anecdotal histories of helping my dad avoid a tree than any actual real value when the rubber meets the ice..
The only thing that saves your ass when the rubber meets the ice (and your car's stability assist fails) are your own lightning fast reflexes and loads of experience.
There can be the usual "do this when the car oversteers, don't do this when it understeers", but it's crucial that the beginner driver experiences it all in a safe and controlled manner. A parking lot, an old airfield, a safe road in the middle of nowhere. Literally the fun stuff we did behind our parents' backs. Pulling the e-brake on FWD cars, drifting the RWD cars, getting a feel for the different sounds of different surfaces under the tires. When doing this on snow and ice it's not even that hard on the car and it's fun and also educational.
A car sliding a bit on a snowy road when you've been expecting it is a non-event. A car sliding unexpectedly with a beginner behind the wheel is a terrifying experience and often a dice roll between stuck-in-a-snow-bank or a head-on collision.
>What kind of education, besides the education we already give about being a safe driver is the kind of education needed to be "good" at driving on snow and ice?
You gotta drill into people's heads that "more of what you're already doing" makes losing traction worse instead of better.
If it were up to me the crappy driver's ed videos would have someone who's obviously really high telling people "you gotta just chill and go with the flow, man"
> Any situation that can be permanently resolved by education and intelligence, rather than by brute-forcing a constant 'workaround', would seem to me to be the best way forwards
Hard disagree. You're essentially proposing the "solution" that nobody should ever make mistakes, and if someone does make a mistake, we should educate them to prevent the mistake in the future. In studies of disaster prevention, this has been shown to be ineffective time and time again: training does not always work in a real situation. Should every driver learn how to control a skid? Yes. Should we rely on that type of training as a substitute for other measures? Surely not, if only because the driving test doesn't have kids in the back or a fallen tree blocking the road.
The current solution is to adjust the environment in such a way as to make mistakes less likely and less damaging. This is what disaster prevention experts recommend. Now, salting roads is not the only way to do this: personally, I think snow tires, tire chains, and TCS software are all better interventions depending on the situation. Putting it all on training, on the other hand, will get people killed.
Another alternative would be to invest much more in rail-based transportation methods, because iirc they don't need salting. Also, they'd avoid the issue of needing to educate every driver on how to avoid slipping and sliding in the winter.
Also in some places it's completely futile to keep adding salt(or it's simply too cold for salt to be effective) and grit is used instead. It's not an insurmountable problem. But yes, driver education is a huge part of it.
Scandinavia also has decent public transport and bicycling infrastructure available for those who fail driving tests and/or can't afford a course. And I imagine such a life is still pretty bad.
> Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education.
Good luck with this. If the past year has taught us anything, it's that Americans will fight tooth and nail against even the slightest hint of being told what to do.
We shift the burden to the government when we should just all have better tires and learn to drive properly. But our current legal and insurance regime probably forces municipalities to salt.
> They need salt. And not the kind of salt that flavors our food, but the kind that melts snow and ice. If we don’t have salt, no one can drive, because salt is what keeps our roads manageable.
Driving in snow/ice without salt is absolutely possible, but requires better driver education.
I may be wrong, but I heard that in certain Scandinavian countries (e.g. Norway) being able to control a skid is part of the driving test.
Driving in snow/ice, even snow/ice that is at the melting point and therefore extremely slippery due to the water, is absolutely possible without salt, but it requires your 'average Joe' to understand that they need to slow down, to leave 10* the space from the car in front, etc.
As many have noted, salt negatively impacts aquatic ecosystems, and also decomposes your shiny new car into a pile of rust.
Any situation that can be permanently resolved by education and intelligence, rather than by brute-forcing a constant 'workaround', would seem to me to be the best way forwards; but as is often the case, stupidity, laziness, resistance to change, and those who provide the salt being scared of the loss of revenue, win out...
/rant