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Comment by nicehill | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating

How do Europeans keep ice off bike lanes? Salt?

Tractors and snowplows. Salt kills the bicycles and salty slush is much worse to drive in. Hard packed snow is actually the best to ride on.

Interestingly Oulu bike roads clearing contract states the company doing the snowplowing can do inspections only on bicycles, not cars :)

Maybe hard packed snow is a strategy for only flat cities

Seattle infamously tried the hard packed snow strategy about a decade ago, and it turned it into a dangerous (hilly) ice rink

There's a difference between riding on hard pack with a bike, and driving a car over it. I have no idea why you think an experiment with hard-pack snow on automotive roads is in anyway indicative of what works on cycle lanes.

Hard pack on a hill doesn't seem to make sense for bicycles either

In Reykjavik they used sand at first because pedestrians prefer that but that is pretty dangerous for cycling so they use salt on designated cycling paths and sand everywhere else.

It depends.

Salt only works until ten below zero. After that it only makes things worse.

When it works the result can be magical if combined with sweeping. Trashes the drivetrain real bad though.

There's a nice big picture how Oulu does it, halfway down the article.

It depends.. salt works down to -18C on cycle paths as long as you maintain it snow free and do not have big puddles of water. Brushing the snow away down to the asphalt is my preferred surface condition for cycling.

This video is a great explainer https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

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