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Comment by bradfa | Hacker News Reader

It'd be interesting to see a comparison between the various ways roads can be made safer for driving in wintry conditions. Plowing is clearly important, but putting down salt vs sand and gravel vs beat juice vs other solutions.

I want to see the performance of various types of vehicles on a test course when using different types of tires (all season vs winter tires at least) and the different salt-alternatives. For the cost of the alternatives, do any of them get close to the performance of salt?

Obviously salt is the cheapest, otherwise it wouldn't be in such high use. Maybe the price of salt going up will create a viable market for other solutions? Maybe some environmental concerns about salt use plus the cost going up will spurn development or cost reductions of competing solutions?

Markets being manipulated isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes people realize they don't need the thing whose market is being manipulated any longer as there's viable alternatives.

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> Obviously salt is the cheapest, otherwise it wouldn't be in such high use.

Not sure why you would assume that's obvious. The various solutions vary in effectiveness due to a number of factors, and are not equal in what they actually do. Sand doesn't melt ice, it provides traction. It's better when it's cold enough for the ice to stay ice. Salt melts ice, but is less effective in lower temperatures, and causes lots of fallout (corrosion, etc). Meanwhile plowing is the only real solution for heavy snowfall.

A small thing to add, not all road salt is the same. Some contain additional additives that allow them to be effective at lower temperatures. From what I recall, the low temperature salt is more expensive though.

Yup. They've got calcium chloride & magnesium chloride.

De-sugared beet juice is a common additive too

Oh yes, absolutely.

A possible solution is allowing studded tires and making snow tires mandatory at certain times of the year (Quebec does this). Studded tires would make driving a lot safer in icy conditions and snow tires are an incredible improvement over regular tires in wintry conditions (tradeoff is they tear up the roads). Winter Tire tech has vastly improved over the years and most manufacturers have added a feature for Icy conditions (sip their tires - https://www.discounttire.com/learn/tire-sipes ).

Salt may be cheap but there are environmental costs. Recently this news article was published about how Toronto rivers are seeing high levels of salt. If it's happening in Toronto, I'm sure it's happening all over the mid west and north east.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/road-salt-gta-water-1...

I think what might make this tough for midwestern states is that the snow doesn't stick around all winter. It's not unheard of to have 4-5 big snows that melt relatively quickly and most of the winter you're just dealing with cold weather. If you won't have a reliable snow pack you can guarantee you'll be driving on for three or four months it's hard to justify swapping out for snow tires or chains.

What will make it tough is that our roads already get destroyed every winter without the help of spiked tires.

In MN the entire summer is filled with road construction already. I wouldn't be that thrilled about switching my tires 2x every year either.

Get the winter set mounted on a second set of steel rims. It's a 45 minute job with the scissor jack that came with the car, less with anything better.

It's a nice excuse to spend a little time outside on a pleasant spring or fall afternoon.

This is exactly what I do. Just have your winter tires on another set of rims and use the jack that came with the car. I do have a impact driver to make getting the lugs on and off a lot faster though.

Exactly. My area gets snow 3-4 times per year, usually less than a foot. It is often gone within a couple of days. Our worst storm this year (roughly 15" of snow), the roads were cleared within a day or two. No way is it economical to buy snow tires; and snow tires damage roadways.

Snow tires do not damage roadways. Only studded tires damage roadways which are illegal in many states.

Studded tires destroy roads and are serious overkill, even for northern MI. (Not sure about CA).

Honestly, newer winter tires are amazing. I DD a newer Camaro with proper extreme weather tires. It's not fabulous in the handling department, but it will stop and go mostly straight.

But put those same tires on any modern family vehicle and you'll be all set. Even roads covered with a solid sheet of ice would be no problem in a FWD Camry.

> Even roads covered with a solid sheet of ice would be no problem in a FWD Camry.

I was with you till that last sentence. Have you ever actually tried to drive (or walk) on a solid sheet of ice? I was involved in a freak situation where the temperature plummeted suddenly after a few hours of mixed ice/water/slush precipitation. The roads and any other concrete flat surface were coated with smooth ice. We sat near a curve and watched all the 4WD vehicles come along and slide off the road. Wherever people were in town that evening they had to stay there until morning.

True sheet ice cannot be handled by any combo of FWD or 4WD without perhaps studs or chains. Even then it is sketchy. Fortunately, that kind of ice is fairly rare on a large scale. However, patches of ice are common and that creates many problems since drivers may not recognize it.

Yeah, I have, every year it's a problem because I live in a neighborhood where sump pumps dump onto the road, so ice dams forming and coating the entire road in smooth ice is common.

Modern extreme winter tires are designed for traction on ice. They are impregnated with this gritty stuff (made of walnuts shells, I think) which grips on ice. The grip is not great, but I can reliably get a RWD sports car up a modest grade in them.

Note that I'm not talking about the Mud and Snow tires that come on most vehicles. These have an indicator that is a snowflake in a mountain and usually can't be used above 60 degrees.

Here's a link to some examples: https://www.tirerack.com/tires/surveyresults/surveydisplay.j...

God help us if they start allowing studded tires in Michigan. I have a colleague who swears that some of the roads here are worse than where he grew up in an extremely poor, rural part of India.

Forcing everyone to spend hundreds of dollars each on studded or snow tires, to change them on and off, and to store them until next year would be prohibitively expensive for the the handful of days each year when the roads are actually snowy in the Midwest.

Yes car owners are rapidly hostile to actually directly paying the costs of their car use in the US.

I was amused when a Bernie supporter contacted me with the argument that Medicare 4 all would lower my car insurance rates. "Why is it a good thing to transfer costs away from drivers?" was my pretty immediate response.

Of course my 'libertarian' leaning state rep supports the same changes to vehicle insurance, except the costs would be dumped on Medicaid most likely.

In my situation, I would leave the Snows on from Nov-March and then spend the 20 minutes putting on my all seasons for spring summer and part of fall(both sets had their own rims). It was all a wash since the all seasons lasted about twice as long since I wasn't using them all year round. Insurance companies also give you a small discount if you have winter tires during winter.

Instead we push the cost off to being paid by everyone via taxes even if they don't drive.

> making snow tires mandatory

Why is this even necessary at all?

I'd like to see anyone who's got to drive a month or three on compacted snow or snow slush and not willing to switch to winter tires.

The car becomes uncontrollable at like 32 kph / 20 mph.

Back there in Finland they use crushed granite and it works just fine without corroding everything in sight and also killing plant life.

I lived in MN for most of my life and I never switched to snow tires. Some people I knew did, and I believe them when they say snow tires are better. However in the end traction just isn't an issue, nobody drives fast when it is icy and at slow speeds I did just fine.

Tread depth/design is king for the "not quite liquid, not quite solid" slush that most snow commuting is done in anyway. All that stuff has to go somewhere, preferably somewhere other than between your tread blocks and the pavement.

The chemical composition of snow tires is completely different compared to an all season tires. All season tires get hard whereas snow tires stay soft. That is why you can't keep snow tires on all year is because they will wear really fast in hot temps because the rubber is soft to begin with.

You can't really require studded tires in a place that can have 2 weeks of lots of snow, followed by 3 weeks of no snow and repeat.

You'd have to repave the entire city each year. And you can't expect motorists to keep adding and removing the studs as the weather changes.

Studded tires are only realistic in a place where you need them for an entire season.

Snow tires on the other hand can help a TON. But not everyone has room to store them in the off season.

Once you consider the environmental and health costs of studded tyres I am not sure if salt is all that bad. It's usually combined with small stones that increase road grip as well. Studded tyres grind the road down to small particles that contribute to the fine dust problem in cities and this also requires new layers of asphalt fairly often.

This may just be a "Just-So" story, but in NZ we've found that Euro cars tend to go to utter shit after six years, requiring their purchase price and then some in spare parts to fix, and that this lifetime exists, because in Europe, after 5 or so years of driving on salted roads, they're corroded to shit, so the cars are engineered to go great for those 5 or so years because afterwards they'll be rooted so what does it matter.

Really want to clarify that this is an Aotearoa urban legend, and I have no idea if it's true or not. I will say though, that finding a running 2005 BMW that hasn't required multiple parts replaced is never heard of. Whereas a 2005 Toyota, no worries.

I guess I like this theory because the alternative is that Euro cars are just built badly compared to Jappas.

European cars, especially German ones, are built for company leasing markets almost exclusively. After the 5 year lease is up, it will be resold. To make more money for the manufacturer, it needs to start breaking down and requiring parts at that point. So everything is engineered to last exactly 5 years.

Huh, well that makes sense.

When I first travelled to München for work, I was amazed at the amount of luxury cars driving around Schwabing, until a German colleague mentioned that they were all most likely leased.

München is the most expensive city to live in in Germany. If you commute there you probably use public transport, if you life there you earn enough that you probably have a company car.

In Germany about 1/8th of all cars and 2/3 of all new cars are company cars.

I don't know about Germany, but The Netherlands has a significant market for second hand cars, and many cars, including German ones, are sold for serious amounts of money when they are 10 years old.

It is instructive to go to scrapyards. Typically many parts of a car are quite cheap. Some parts has some sort of design error and fail in almost all cars of the same model. However that varies from model to model and from brand to brand.

Of course, the lease market prefers low maintainance costs. So it makes sense for manufactures to optimize in reducing those costs during typical maintainance periods. But that does not imply that after 5 years or so, maintainance is suddenly sky high.

European cars are engineered to feel good while taking money out of your wallet. The 3 euro cars I owned all felt incredibly solid and substantial. They also were constantly in the shop and expensive to maintain. It has made me appreciate my Jeep and it’s less than solid build quality but still runs fine forever. Ironically my Jeep is based on a Mercedes Benz suv(Grand Cherokee shares some bits with the GLS) but hasn’t required the same monetary commitment to keep running.

A while after college, my wife moved to San Francisco from upstate New York. The first mechanic she took her car to asked whether she took the car to the beach a lot. He was not used to cars driven on salted roads.

European cars have more complexity, so more things that can break that requires expensive parts especially things that makes it more comfortable to drive on roads that are rarely flat or straight. There's less space for parking and more public transport in Europe so the second hand vehicle market is constrained so there's less incentive to make the cars last longer to retain resale value. Western European climate is wetter so corrosion used to be a big issue but it's much less so with modern materials. There's also a critical mass issue, e.g. Toyota is not so popular in some parts of Europe so the parts end up more expensive than say for VW parts.

My tip is to buy a car that's relatively popular where you are and in that area have a reputation for reliability and maintainability because this is actually different depending on where in the world you are.

For example I drive a first generation Land Rover Freelander in the UK that's 17 years old and it's the most reliable and maintainable vehicle I've had in the 5 different countries that I've lived in, but to most people around the world it would sound like I'm completely insane.

Living in upstate NY, it's rare to see cars more than 15 years old on the road. Metal cars rot out from corrosion to the point where they're not worth fixing after a little over a decade. For example, I used to own a 2005 VW Jetta which I really liked but I've not seen a VW Jetta or Golf of that vintage on the road in a long time.

It's not just the European cars which rot out due to corrosion around here, all makes and models do it. No one brand is terrifically worse than any other in terms of corroding away due to winter use.

A good number of people apply "undercoating" treatments to their cars around here. The creeping oil type treatments seem to provide a reasonable amount of protection with few downsides other than getting really messy when you need to work on the underside of the car. The rubberized types, if not applied properly and prior to any corrosion starting, seem to do more harm than good. But even undercoated cars will eventually succumb to corrosion. If you want a car to last here you store it away from about November till April.

In late 2019, I finally unloaded a 1997 2-seater I hadn't driven in the winter for quite a long time. The car was from the last model year (Honda del Sol) and was a minor cult thing. Latterly, the mechanics at the dealer always gathered round to look at it as basically you never saw them in the wild in the Northeast any longer.

Chiming in from the Midwest USA: cars manufactured with galvanized (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanization) metal seem to fair better in my experience. That said, galvanization isn't terribly common and as you mentioned, if you really care about your car you should store it in the winter.

We just use the local carwash that blasts your undercarriage to get the salt off. Everytime it snows, the line at the carwash a few days later is long...

What I learned recently is that Japan (where I've only lived) is one of the country that has snowiest (not coldest) cities. I had thought norway or somewhere near is more snowiest but isn't. Maybe due to snower places aren't developed?

https://snownotes.org/japan-one-of-the-major-snowest-country...

Possibly it makes Japanese car relatively solid for snow. (But note that most car manufacturer's HQ/R&D isn't located in snowy city)

Sand isn't all that useful at temperatures near freezing- as the snow / ice melts a bit in the sun, it sinks in, and you end up with fresh glaze as it cools and refreeze. Using salt or similar to completely melt the cover allows it to drain off the road or sublimate, leaving the road dry.

Yeah, and I'd like to see a scientific study about this to show how it works and so people can understand it. A significant amount of money is spent on clearing and treating roads during wintry weather, I think it would be very beneficial to understand why taxpayers spend this money and what they get in return.

Additionally, if information such as "winter tires are X% better at stopping/turning than all season tires when treating roads with Y" could be presented, then maybe more people would opt to purchase winter tires (or maybe the opposite) depending on what types of solutions the local government uses.

Why tax payers spend the money: so roads are safe to travel on.

What they get: safe roads to travel on.

I don’t think we need a study here.

A brief google search brought up a PDF for winter tires from the traffic injury reduction foundation, with the basic conclusion that yes, they are better, but updated studies are needed for exact numbers.

Walk into any car tire store, and you will see displays for winter tires claiming anywhere from 25-35% improved stopping distance. Of course, with less frequent plowing, salting and sanding, these numbers likely go out the window. They get you better stopping distance, but they aren't magic and it is still worse than all season tires on a dry, summer road.

If you want safer winter roads, you use salt and / or sand and plow every time significant accumulation of snow occurs.

I drive on unplowed paved roads and I can tell you from first hand experience that there is a world of difference between snow tires and all season tires. The chemistry of the tire itself is different. All season tires start getting hard around 40F whereas snow tires stay soft/rubbery below 40F and colder. This is fundamentally why snow tires are superior for snowy/icy conditions. This is also why you should not use snow tires in summer because they will wear very fast due to the composition being soft.

The use of sand also requires extensive street cleaning each spring. Lots of the sand gets recovered, and is presumably re-used.

Reused? Ha-ha. Just swept somewhere out of sight.

Which is much better than the salts, because sand is mostly neutral, while salts, esp slow-dissoving stuff kills plant life long after the season ends.

Well, it's collected, and if they already have it in a dump truck, why wouldn't they re-use it? In the spring, the street cleaner cleans my whole street, and dumps each load at the dead-end. Later, it gets loaded into a dump truck and taken somewhere (3-4 dump truck loads in total, estimated).

The last few years they've used sand a lot more sparsely (only on intersections and hills), so I'm pretty sure the street cleaner only picks up one load and can carry it away without needing a dump truck.

It's not re-used. It goes to a landfill. There's too much street garbage mixed in by the time they sweep it up in the spring.

Sounds reasonable. But even as landfill I bet it gets reused as cover.

Maybe, but worth noting that both Vermont and Colorado (maybe more), have banned the use of salt on roadways due to environmental concerns. So to ops point, there are alternatives to using salt, even with near-freezing temperatures.

> So to ops point, there are alternatives to using salt, even with near-freezing temperatures.

in my experience here in colorado, the most commonly chosen alternative is "do nothing".

they dump the gravel/sand stuff out sometimes, but then it just accumulates near intersections, reducing traction in dry weather until the end of spring when they go sweep it off the sides of the roads.

Around here, they use grit instead of a fine sand. It doesn't matter as mcuh if there is a melt and freeze cycle. Since the grit is around the size of a pea, it leaves textured ice.

Don't get me wrong, you can still slip and fall, but I can catch myself more often and tires seem to do well enough.

We get a mix of grit and sand at intersections and steep hills, but it only lasts just so long- sand disappears and grit gets kicked off the road. It certainly beats salt alone, especially on a hilly gravel road and sharp turns and intersections, but I wouldn't advocate for it as a complete replacement.

Well, you can design the roads better. Two primary ways are used.

The first is material properties. For example, it's possible to make roads using asphalt mixtures which naturally prevent ice from forming. I've heard a rumor that the Autobahn is made of such a compound, but I can't find corroborating evidence right now.

The second is shaping the surface. For example, leaving parallel grooves in the driving surface increases traction. See the first picture at this link for an example: https://www.concreteconstruction.net/how-to/construction/con...

The latter technique is used widely across the Midwest. I'm not certain about usage of the former, but road maintenance costs are significantly higher in the Midwest than other parts of the country thanks to multiple freeze-thaw cycles per year, so switching to a ice-mitigating compound may not be cost-effective when balancing multiple variables. If an ice-mitigating compound reduces roadway durability, you'll avoid it since you'll need to send a plow over the road anyways to clear the snow...

No, the Autobahn just doesn't typically get that cold and has highest priority access to snow plows.

"salt is cheapest" does not take into account all the associated damages they cause as well, from eating away at bridges, roads, and vehicles, to polluting waterways that are starting to kill off freshwater fish.

I'd be wary of say expending a lot more money on an alternative / more expensive solution... just because someone cornered the market.

You can use it as a scorched earth tactic. If the market disappears as soon as it's cornered, in the long term people will stop cornering markets.

But more importantly if you use a solution with a lot of known downsides for the sole reason that it's the cheapest, reevaluating that decision when costs rise is the prudent thing to do.

> in the long term people will stop cornering markets

I'm not at all convinced that is the case.

> if you use a solution with a lot of known downsides for the sole reason that it's the cheapest

I don't think your scenario means people will somehow consider something they didn't consider before. More likely in a disruptive event folks do whatever they can to fill the gap at the lowest price again ...

I think you're expecting efficiencies / consideration here that simply doesn't happen... or maybe already have.

Why isn't tire chains solution for rarely snowed area?

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