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Comment by neartheplain | Hacker News Reader

Winter tires and/or tire chains were uncommon where I grew up in a midsized city of the Great Lakes region. We regularly got multiple feet of snowfall, and depended mainly on city plows and salt trucks. I only encountered tire chains with any frequency when I moved to the West Coast, mostly in the context of driving to Lake Tahoe.

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Many Scandinavian countries require cars to switch over from summer to winter tires and the other way around in spring and in autumn. Some even allow tires with spikes, which damage the roads, but only in winter. Spikes allow you to drive on very icy roads when it is too cold for salt to work. Driving from Sweden into Denmark, they'd actually check your tires at the border in the winter sometimes because they do not want people damaging their roads with their spikes.

Kind of sensible to require cars have proper tires; also from an insurance point of view.

In DFW this year it was -18c one day and two later it was 25c. That isn't normal but every year we have at most one or two periods where there is at most a week of frozen precipitation. The problem is we don't know which month it is going to happen in and it happens suddenly. Climate change made it worse perhaps, but it has been this way for at least decades. I rember waiting in line for santa it was a beautiful 22c, before we got to the front of the line it was -7c.

Many mountainous regions across Europe too, like the French region where I live. Tyres are potentially part of any routine police check. The region is a rather poor one, and many roads are simply not salted at all. With proper winter tyres (and AWD helps too, but it's not as important as tyres), you get through, albeit sometimes with poor elegance.

The amount of snow we get is never anywhere close to those American phenomena I see sometimes in the news, where snow gets half way up your front doors nearly overnight. Seeing that, I'm surprised to read that most people don't use snow tyres in such places : it feels like going against common sense even on an purely individual level.

In places that get a lot of snow we have good snow removal. Thus you don't need snow tires as you aren't driving in it much. You also learn to drive in snow, which mostly means slow down.

And conversely we read about what anyone in the Midwest would consider to be a minor snowstorm and it causes a catastrophe in the South. See for example this article about 3 inches of snow in Atlanta, Georgia.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/atlanta-other-parts-of-south-pa...

That makes sense. Then there is still the problem of the cold tarmac, on which summer tyres are said to have poor grip, but that may not be as obvious to the average commuter as a road turned to thick white with two icy ruts to follow. And anyway I'm getting off topic regarding salt :)

This is changing somewhat though. Several of the larger cities in Norway are struggling with poor air quality during winter, so studded tires have either been banned or require you to pay a tax in order to use them. [1]

This doesn't apply everywhere though, and people are require to use common sense and use the tires (and chains) that are best for where they live.

[1] - https://www.stavanger.kommune.no/en/waste-and-environment/mi...

How do studded tires harm air?

I could see higher rolling resistance leading to poorer fuel efficiency and greater exhaust emissions. Though, I imagine temperature inversions, home heating (particularly via wood), etc. have a much greater impact on Winter air quality.

Faster tire abrasion causes

a) more particulate pollution from tire residual (which can be massively worse than pollution from exhaust in cities)

b) more exhaust pollution from worse car mileage

This is more or less correct; a car with studded tires will average around 20kgs of asphalt dust over a normal winter season.

I live in greater metro Detroit and I used to think the same thing, until I bought winter tires and tried to get an appointment to have them put on in mid-November -- Discount Tire and Bell Tire were both booked solid for weeks with everyone swapping to winters, so I think it's more common than you'd know just looking around.

That said, I didn't buy them until I had a long commute after graduating from college, since I could get around well enough in the college town only needing to go a few miles to the grocery store and such.

Now, mid and post pandemic, I'll probably only maintain a set for one vehicle since that's all I'll be driving in ugly weather, since I'll be staying home whenever the weather is even vaguely questionable.

My friend that lives in the mountains bought a set of cheap steel wheels to keep his winter tires on. That way he can swap them out without going to the tire shop.

The dichotomy between Detroit and Ontario is interesting. Anecdotally my experience has been that folks in Ontario (Ontarians?) are much more likely to equip winter tires than my peers and neighbors here in Detroit.

When I lived in Detroit, I was happy when I would just have enough money to buy some (used) tires with tread on them at all. Another set just for winter was totally out of the question.

...and I wasn’t even the most broke of my friends, all of whom drove every day (because how else do you get to work?).

It might be a legality thing. I don't know about Ontario specifically, but I live in BC and there are a lot of roads that are closed to drivers without winter rated tires. Some places even require you to have chains in the vehicle.

In general owning a car in Canada is significantly more expensive than my experience in the states. Gas is currently $4.82USD. My insurance is close to double what it was in the US. And there is 12% sales tax on vehicles in BC.

The flip side is that in the cities, transit is much better. A lot of my Canadian friends (mostly Vancouver and Toronto) didn't get their first cars until their mid twenties because it is faster and cheaper to use transit for a lot of purposes.

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