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Comment by Lio | Hacker News Reader

We regularly salt our roads in winter in the UK even if it's not as cold as Canada.

Salting of roads is only done a very narrow band of environments, the UK sitting in the middle of it. If it’s too cold, only a couple of degrees lower than a UK winter, then the salted melt water will re-freeze into deadly black ice. I believe the UK is fairly unique in how much we salt roads, most other countries will grit roads but not salt them.

Salting is useless if it gets too cold. So it’s only done at max -7C or so (if memory serves right). Here in Finland the southern parts are a salth bath. But the colder northern parts are not salted, and that shows in the average rust levels of cars.

Wait until they make the eventual switch to liquid magnesium chloride. Amazing for roads and ice. Pretty awful for rust.

Here in Seattle the DOT is proud to salt the roads, in spite of the damage it causes to plants, cars and the dirty runoff it generates.

Considering we didn't let a current mayor make it to the runoffs over his mishandling of snowmageddon a decade ago, I don't think SDOT will be considering modern salt alternatives anytime soon.

It is kinda odd, in snowier rural Oregon they just used red rock cinders to deliver snow and ice traction effectively. But salt seems to be a lower effort solution?

https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/02/06/seattles-salt-addicti...

Without a sufficient number of snow plows, they can't keep the snow on roads down to an acceptable amount, so just adding traction elements doesn't help. They never even plowed the almost-arterial near my house, let alone my actual road. At least with salt it will keep the snow softer and more likely to be pushed away by traffic.

And that mushy mass won’t freeze, unless it’s -13c or colder

Different use cases.

Salt works great when it’s re-freezing back and forth multiple times a day. Stone chips are great when it freezes once and stays for a long time.

We salt them in Canada too.

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