Many places in the midwest have actually switched away from using salt to melt snow because it does a lot of damage to concrete and vehicles. Sand is a popular alternative, but frequent ploughing is often enough to keep main roads clear. Raised vehicles like trucks and SUVs are also much more common in the midwest to avoid getting stuck in the snow.
> America tends to operate in just-in-time style inventory models instead of managing risk by storing surpluses of critical commodities
I don't think this a particularly fair criticism. Deicing salt works by absorbing moisture as it lands, before it can form a sheet of ice. It's useless if it gets wet before you use it. It's pretty dry in the midwest during the winter, but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is quite heavy and bulky.
> Deicing salt works by absorbing moisture as it lands, before it can form a sheet of ice.
That's...false? Salt gets spread on existing ice to melt it all the time. Where does the absorbed water go in this model? This assertion is so confusing.
As someone who grew up in a cold climate, the way I recall it is that the salt lowers the freezing point of water by forming a brine, allowing it to run off the road and/or be evaporated by the sun.
It's not quite as straightforward as "yes it does" / "no it doesn't." There's a temperature at which it's too cold for salt to work, and a great deal of the benefit of salt comes from friction as cars drive over it, crushing pieces of ice and forming that slush we all know and love, even at temperatures where it won't actually melt the ice.
I think the person is just saying that pre-emptively salting the road (before snow/freezing rain actually lands) provides some additional level of safety because the road might spend less time with a frozen coating (as opposed to salting only after the surface is frozen over).
>Many places in the midwest have actually switched away from using salt to melt snow
They use salt to melt ice. They plow snow. The only times I've seen the midwest US use sand instead of salt is when the temperatures are below where salt is still effective.
Do you have a citation for this statement, because it is 100% the opposite of what I see in my day-to-day life.
I presume the snow/ice was just a mixup, don't think there is much point arguing about it.
Yes, when I grew up in Sweden salt was everywhere as well. Then before I moved away the forbid salt in some places and replaced it with sand. If I recall correctly, erosion on cars and the effect on local fauna being the reason. I mostly saw sand being used instead of salt at that point. Now I don't know how it looks, as it was a couple of years ago, but I expect sand to be used even more now than before, as the country is getting more focused on ecology and sustainability.
Some area's won't be allowed to use salt, I know in Issaquah in Washington state they could not use salt upon the roads due to laws to protect the salmon streams.
Probably a fair few area's in which salt is prohibited for road use due to such things. So sand makes sense and for some that is all they will see in their area.
We use a mix by me. Sand goes for most stuff. Hills and dangerous intersections get salt. I think salt costs several times what sand costs, so it is only used where deemed necessary.
Madison WI still uses salt, but we also use a lot of a mixture of sand and salt, which looks like pure sand from a distance, and liquid salt solution sprayed directly on dry roads before snowstorms when possible. The city claims that both of these methods, while not eliminating salt, greatly reduce its use.
The city also puts out piles of sand-salt for residents to use, so I usually grab some at the start of the winter. The mixture is easier to store than either sand or salt by themselves. For instance, a pile of salted sand won't freeze solid.
Salt works by freezing point depression. You can throw salt on sheet ice and it will melt the ice, until it gets too cold. Calcium chloride works to even lower temperatures.
Does putting all this salt on the sidewalks and driveways of your house affect plants around your house? I would imagine that over the years the salt buildup in the soils around everyone’s house would be immense. In ancient times they would salt enemies agricultural land to prevent plants from growing. Do plants not grow near to sidewalks and driveways in the Midwest?
Up here in the Fox Valley we've been using brine and selectively salting roads to reduce salt usage. There are concerns about sand usage adding sediment to storm drains and into Winnebago, but I think the same applies to salt as well.
> I don't think this a particularly fair criticism. Deicing salt works by absorbing moisture as it lands, before it can form a sheet of ice. It's useless if it gets wet before you use it
Over here deicing is frequently done with brine because it sticks better to the road and doesn't get blown away, so I'm very skeptical about the salt being useless when it's wet.
To add to this, there was a piece on NPR a few days ago where they talked about brine as a more environmentally friendly option to rock salt. De-icing salt gets into lakes and streams, and with brine you need much less salt to achieve the same results apparently.
The point was that rock/crystal salt is useless if it gets wet, because then it can't be reasonably used/moved/broadcast. If it turns into giant bricks of salt, it's impossible to work with.
My late father worked in the salt industry. There is no cost effective substitute for salt. Sand is used for traction purposes, not to melt ice.
There are a number of chemicals that will melt ice though not as well as salt. But these alternatives are much more expensive, they get talked about a lot but haven't made a dent in salts market share.
Similarly, in the northwest salt actually becomes a liability when temperatures are well below freezing. Using salt can actually increase the incidence of more compact, harder-to-see ice (aka black ice) because of the slight thawing and refreezing.
All our county plow trucks scatter gravel behind them. Only businesses seem to sprinkle salt around their entrances.
I don’t think public works and highway departments can really say “just get an SUV lol” unless they’re really rural. Plenty of small cars on the road in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis, etc.
Yeah, even in smaller towns there are a ton of people with Civics, Neons, and Saturns, and they have to get through all winter. You do need to carry a shovel in case the plow leaves a berm across your street or driveway apron though.The remaining ones not destroyed by road salt rust.
SUVs actually often have worse traction because the larger tyres are more expensive so some buyers go with a single set of all-weather instead of a proper M+S tyre in winter.
It's fine if it's wet as long as it can still be spread by the spreader. In fact, there has to be some moisture in order for the salt to lower the freezing point. It can't mix easily with frozen ice that has no free moisture.
"Pre Wetting" salt is actually a tactic used for snow/ice mitigation for this exact reason.
> "...but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is quite heavy and bulky."
to provide some color, just-in-time doesn't literally mean holding no inventory and perfectly matching inflows to outflows. it means that stores of inventory and intermediate work product are minimized as much as possible in light of the typical mean and variance of a process, but not more than that.
in the case of a town, that means you'd likely size the salt store to be one storm's worth of salt and then trigger a replenishment as soon as a storm is imminent (just in time; that is, when necessity is established, but no sooner). you'd also likely try to deplete the store at the end of a storm season and replenish a storm's worth at the beginning of the next.
That's assuming you can get salt in time for the storm, or even at all at that point. At least on the consumer side, a lot of the manufacturing facilities that produce deicing salt switch over to producing fertilizer around new year's. A year or two ago we had a late winter storm and all of the stores in the area were out, and their warehouses too.
Who does that? Salt is used to melt ice, not snow.
>>Raised vehicles like trucks and SUVs ... to avoid getting stuck in the snow.
"Raised" vehicles are not tall because of snow. That clearance is for off-road driving, not snow on a road. Any public road would be closed long before snow became so deep as to actually require a car to have greater ground clearance. If anything, a taller vehicle is more of a liability on a slippery road. The ideal vehicle for winter on road driving is any 4WD/AWD car with some good snow tires and a modern traction control system.
The ideal vehicle for slippery conditions is actually rear wheel drive, with ABS brakes. RWD means that everything you do reminds you that it is slippery and so you never get going fast. 4wd/awd means that you get going fast enough that you end up well into the ditch instead of just stopped on the side of the road where you can push yourself out without a tow truck.
The above is partially tongue in cheek, but there is a point worth thinking about.
There is plenty of wind-blown sand, which I imagine is fine for this snow-on-road use. Rough river sand is getting more scarce and smooth, wind-blown desert sand should not be used for making concrete.
Minnesota pays 30-40% more per ton for salt than NY or Ohio. Midwest governments should be using their buying power and ability to control political subdivisions to make these mergers less profitable. For commodities, this is an area where government procurement shines.
In the absence of sane Federal regulatory action, consolidation of suppliers is best addressed by consolidating demand. A state like Minnesota should be forcing cities/counties to use a single state contract and leverage that demand to pull salt in from Canada, Western NY, wherever. Then use multi-state alliances to drive more demand and concessions from suppliers.
The downside is that winner take all procurement will put incumbents out of business, but that will happen anyway.
>> winner take all procurement will put incumbents out of business
The worst part isn't that companies go out of business, they probably won't, but that after a few rounds of one big state contract only one company will have the capacity to even bid for the contact. That one big company will then subcontract lots of little local delivery contracts. The one big company will have then effectively replaced the government in that it will manage salt delivery across the state.
End of the day, the market is doing that anyway. Remember the private equity folks are buying up the means of production -- contracting out trucking or whatever is meaningless.
It's obviously building an old-school Trust, but under our current legal philosophy, as long the private equity / public companies slowly boil the frog and the commodity doesn't increase in price quickly, there will be no Federal regulatory action.
All of these things are re-treads of what happened between 1880-1920. The cost efficiencies driving profit are about using computer tech to reduce labor and other costs. In the old days, it was spinning machines powered by coal/gas/electricity displacing water or craft work. It's more profitable/lower risk to build a monopoly and slowly implement cost-cutting than to be forced to do so by a competitve marketplace.
That’s silly. A single buyer doesn’t have to buy the entire supply in one shot. They could easily say “We buy the cheapest marginal salt in any quantity until our total capacity is met. You must beat $CANADA_PRICE + $IMPORT_PRICE, as well as $NY_PRICE + $TRANSPORT_PRICE or we’ll have to buy from them instead”.
Minnesota state procurement is seriously broken with residents now paying the second highest taxes in the nation (after CA). The only question is whether this should be attributed to incompetence via political appointments or straight up graft.
Check out the MNLARS project, if you’re interested in another excellent example. Pay attention to the insane dollar amounts involved and feel free to make up your own mind if the people in charge of that project were really that dumb or if there is something more sinister going on.
Minnesotans don't have much time for political nonsense. Taxes in Minnesota are not an issue. We have had the highest voter participation percentage of any state for a long time.
This is a great state to live in that cares about its citizens, people with disabilities and children. We also have great schools but we do have a large achievement gap. Another thing that bothers me are some of the inequities across counties. We also have a lack of affordable housing like everyone else does.
Road salt isn’t a complex delivery of services. It’s a pure commodity.
Large complex procurement fails or needs change orders frequently because they are large and complex. Buyers don’t understand what they want and sellers understand what they are told. More bidders often drive prices up.
Commodities are different. It’s driven by volume and competitive process. If 30 salt miners bid, you’re getting a good price. If 2 bid, your only path to better pricing is to go vertical to control demand. State governments are able to do that for this type of commodity. Supermarkets do the same thing with produce, although that was illegal until recently.
Making direct comparisons among state income taxes is facile without acknowledging the marginalized rates. Do California and Minnesota have high tax rates? Yes, but only for high income individuals. California's highest bracket doesn't kick in until you make over $1MM and Minnesota doesn't until you make over $275k. Iowa's top tax bracket begins at $75k as an example. Someone making $80k per year would pay higher income taxes in Iowa than in Minnesota or California yet strangely the internet isn't full of people ranting about the tax rates in Iowa. If you compare effective tax rates versus median income, California and Minnesota aren't even in the top 20 most expensive tax states.
Morton Salt from it's beginning led a charmed life. The company was so well managed that it was a Wall Street favorite. Then they got a young CEO in his thirties. He thought the company could be even more profitable if they got rid of everyone in the company over 55 years of age. Their replacements could be hired for much less money than they were making. This was before laws prohibiting it so he went ahead and did it.
My father who had spent a thirty year career at Morton Salt was suddenly out of a job after having the best year in his career. What the young CEO didn't realize is that in one swoop he got rid of some of the top performers while at the same time wiping out the people most responsible for maintaining the company's winning culture.
Within six months the stock collapsed, the young CEO had no answers and was fired. Morton Salt never recovered. They were merged with Thiokol and after the space shuttle disaster that merger was unwound. The once proud Morton Salt was passed around between different chemical companies until becoming part of Milliken's empire. All because of a single action by a young CEO.
Morton Salt has whitewashed that part of their history. I know it because I lived it. If there wasn't a Harvard case study there should be.
Some of the employees sued though my father chose not to be part of the lawsuit because he had moved on. The company lost the lawsuit but I can't find any record of it on Google. I don't think that was a coincidence ;<).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
"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.
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.
This reminds me that this is what annoys me about comedians doing news. Everyone thinks their favorite late night talk show host is better news because they raise awareness in a digestible format. But they arent willing to realize that every single topic - if it is on their show - is presented in a pejorative view.
Between the quick cuts to “here’s a funny photoshop” (said in John Oliver’s voice), it should be a red flag that they aren’t actually balancing out the purpose of an organization or system or how it got to be that way
Its just “system you aren't a part of is bad, we raised awareness, we did it you’re informed!”
Trevor Noah, John Stewart, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj, all do/did it the same
This bothers me. All part of the same polarizing filter bubbles we want to think that only people with different beliefs are in.
I'm reminded of John Stewart on a Tucker Carlson show 15 years ago where Stewart had to explain the difference between his Comedy Central comedy show and Tucker's News show.
I didn't know all the right news was so non-pejorative. Maybe if they'd add a laugh track it would be more entertaining.
I don’t know how people can stand the John Oliver/Hasan Minhaj schtick. The shows are so formulaic with some out of context clip followed by a crude analogy. “That would be like if so and so did this and that and blah blah”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Winter tires (not studded) really are amazing. I live near DC, so don't normally use them (we don't get enough snow to bother - just stay home for a day or two and it's melted).
But, when I had a Miata (small RWD sports car), I did use them and they made the car one of the best snow vehicles I've owned. Better than the AWD Lexus SUV we owned at the time for sure.
Yep; had an RX8 in Ithaca, NY. Had 2 sets of wheels + tires: one for summer and one for winter. The winter tires meant I was cruising safely and smoothly in a RWD car while regular vehicles with all seasons (and on occasion, Subarus with AWDs) were struggling to climb up or drive safely down (relatively) steep streets.. (Ithaca is a bit hilly)
It depends on the region. In parts of the Rockies (and other mountainous areas of the US), they are seasonally required, sometimes only on certain roads.
Winter tires are completely serviceable on dry pavement. I'm actually pretty surprised to read that people in the midwest don't regularly switch tires in the winter. The importance of winter tires comes just as much from their behavior in cold temperatures as it does from the different tread pattern. All-season tires use harder rubber compounds that lose nearly all their grip in the cold.
I run winter tires until lows in my area are mostly above freezing, regardless of whether there's any snow on the ground.
In countries where winter tyres are comon, tyre shops that offer tyre changes also offer storage for your unused tyres for something like 30 Euro (for all 4) per season. Or 50 Euro and they'll even wash your tyres for you.
Yeah of course this doesn't exist in the US, but if they made winter tyres mandatory surely someone will start this business.
buy another set of wheels. swap the entire set twice a year. usually the shop will charge you less to swap a whole wheel than to swap the tires themselves (less labor). if you have a small apartment, the unused set can make nice stools for guests. if that aesthetic isn't for you, there are things called "storage units" that you can rent to store things you don't want to keep in your apartment.
In most of the northern US, that wouldn't make much of a difference without properly plowed and salted roads.
Winter tires are no help, for instance, when you're on what amounts to a sheet of ice.
They're also no help when you're in 2 feet of snow.
They're a big help at the margins, and it's definitely worth the investment in many, many cases, but they're absolutely no substitute for sufficient road treatment.
They do, in fact, help on ice. There are plenty of youtube videos showing winter tire demos on hockey rinks.
And again, yes, they help substantially in 2 feet of snow.
I agree that properly treated roads are necessary, but we treat roads for the lowest common denominator. If we as a population properly prepared (say that three times fast) for poor road conditions, we and our environment would be way better off.
I thought this sounded surprising, salt is used for lots of things, and it'd be surprising if road use was the main one. So I went to look, found a bunch of sources, including [1] and indeed this does not look to be correct.
Further down the article acknowledges that indeed only about 40% of salt is used for deicing roads, but it really annoys me when writers knowingly write misleading statements at the top of their piece for "impact".
The article also fails to mention that there are a number of alternatives available if it's infeasible to acquire salt in sufficient quantities, such as CMA[2]. Currently CMA is about 13x more expensive, but that would seem to put some sort of constraint on just how much price gouging is possible, especially as CMA and similar alternatives have a lot of significant upsides, such as much less vehicle damage and environmental impact.
They actually gave the number lower down. “Roughly 40% of domestic salt, produced largely from mining, is used not for food or chemicals, but for deicing.”
So, I don’t know what the issue here as the term main use is as you say accurate.
I won't argue this specific case but, in general, terms like "most," "about half," a "significant majority," and so forth can be more readable for a general audience than spouting off a bunch of precise numbers (which may not really be that accurate anyway).
> Further down the article acknowledges that indeed only about 40% of salt is used for deicing roads
Isn't that the main use then? The article doesn't say the majority is used for deicing. It says it's the main use. Unless there is another use at 41%, then this is the main use.
In what possible world is a 13x priced chemical a meaningful rebuttal to the notion that this conglomerate would be free to gouge prices? It’s good to know it exists, but it’s a red herring from an argumentation perspective.
As others have already stated, though probably not the most informative, “main” is a reasonable choice in this context. Given that, your choice to label it as knowingly misleading for impact is itself more deserving of criticism than the thing your criticizing.
As a small fleet owner I would gladly deal with increased car accidents if it meant they didn't salt the roads.
I would gladly buy studded tires and chain up if they didn't salt the roads.
I would gladly deal with worse traffic in the winter if they didn't salt the roads.
I would gladly incur a greater risk of harm or death if they didn't salt the roads.
I would voluntarily pay more fuel taxes if they didn't salt the roads.
I would put up with all sorts of shit to get the state to stop chemically destroying my property. And pretty much everyone I know feels the same way.
When people complain about public policy written by people in ivory towers who are unaffected by their own policy this is the kind of crap they're talking about. To see such policy presented as though there are no tradeoffs what so ever just drives the point home.
Edit: Since apparently I didn't leave enough space between the lines for people to read, let me make this clear. I'm doing ok. I my fleet is N=6. I can play musical panel vans and station wagons as needed in order to keep costs down and put the wear and tear where I want it. That insulates me pretty well from vehicle maintenance issues. I can phase a vehicle out by neglecting it and then buy a replacement. Someone driving one old car to their job does not have this luxury. You're caught between several rocks and hard places with regard to transportation options. The state is raising the cost of you dragging your butt to your job and telling you its for your benefit. What's an annoyance for me is a serious financial problem for others.
As a Canadian who lives with salted roads all the time ... what are you talking about? There is nobody I know that wants this. Studded tires and chains chew up asphalt. No one wants to die on icy roads. No one wants to spend 6 hours stuck in cold weather hoping you don't run of of gas because of an accident caused by icy roads.
My last car, a Toyota Camry lasted 12 years without noticeable rust and, for all I know, is still running in the used market. My 2015 Prius is pristine. What "chemically destroying" is going on?
Salt doesn't make sense if you get a LOT of snow and have steady cold weather but for vast parts of Canada and the US it makes sense.
As a small fleet owner, you are effectively the landed elite. Ivory tower nothing, this is money-before lives of others.
As a previously poor owner of a previously junky car that was previously leased by someone who appreciated salt on the roads ... I also appreciated salt on the roads.
In fact, I was recently back in MN, and my outright-owned, otherwise nice vehicle which did stand to take some damage from salt, but I appreciated when they salted the roads.
Salting the roads aren't doing junky car owners any favors. I've had to replace suspension components, fuel lines, entire frames for rust. These things need to be replaced to keep the vehicle going and are not cheap. Suddenly that $3k honda civic is looking at $3k worth of repairs unless you want to risk your life when you approach highway speeds. I'm always shocked how in California there are absolutely beat up cars from the 70s all over the roads still.
My fleet is fine. I'm rolling in the dough (relatively to the average person who has to deal with these problems). My maintenance is done in house (mostly by me) at very low cost. I have a slow season to spend on preventive repairs.
The janitor driving a 1997 pile who gets to choose between $1k for a new exhaust or $2k to roll the dice on a replacement vehicle is the person who really gets screwed here.
We moved to the next town over four winters ago. We still do all our shopping in the original place because that's where all the stores are and where I work.
Our ten year old car went from having no rust to having completely rusted out rocker panels in two winters.
Granted, they seemed to rust from the inside out, but over the course of the winter you can watch in real time as the rust spreads and dissolves more of the car.
I appreciate that the road is always clear and passable. That's great.
I wouldn't mind the rust so much except body shops won't touch the stuff. They only want to deal with fender benders and whatnot on new vehicles with fat insurance payouts.
Not much appetite for patching cars up and keeping them on the road.
A lot of people have taken a rather negative interpretation of this post. I certainly see how it could be read that way, but let's for a second assume that maybe the author is just a little tone-def, perhaps didn't score top of the class in social awareness (a trait perhaps others here might share).
Perhaps what the author meant by saying that they are a small fleet owner is that they for professional reasons are highly aware of side=effects and negatives consequences of salting roads, things which also hit people who don't have a fleet of cars they are managing.
When you have a fleet, you have more data points than when you only have a single car.
And yes, I've been poor and homeless myself, so I am speaking from an understanding of what it means to be on the edge (and sometimes on the wrong side of the edge).
Chains and studded tires lead to increased road wear. When I lived there the joke was MN has 142K miles of paved roads, but only enough asphalt for 100k.
Readit News
> America tends to operate in just-in-time style inventory models instead of managing risk by storing surpluses of critical commodities
I don't think this a particularly fair criticism. Deicing salt works by absorbing moisture as it lands, before it can form a sheet of ice. It's useless if it gets wet before you use it. It's pretty dry in the midwest during the winter, but humidity spikes in the summer making deicing salt difficult to store in the off-season. Climate-controlled storage is expensive and deicing salt is quite heavy and bulky.
That's...false? Salt gets spread on existing ice to melt it all the time. Where does the absorbed water go in this model? This assertion is so confusing.
As someone who grew up in a cold climate, the way I recall it is that the salt lowers the freezing point of water by forming a brine, allowing it to run off the road and/or be evaporated by the sun.
I think the person is just saying that pre-emptively salting the road (before snow/freezing rain actually lands) provides some additional level of safety because the road might spend less time with a frozen coating (as opposed to salting only after the surface is frozen over).
They use salt to melt ice. They plow snow. The only times I've seen the midwest US use sand instead of salt is when the temperatures are below where salt is still effective.
Do you have a citation for this statement, because it is 100% the opposite of what I see in my day-to-day life.
Yes, when I grew up in Sweden salt was everywhere as well. Then before I moved away the forbid salt in some places and replaced it with sand. If I recall correctly, erosion on cars and the effect on local fauna being the reason. I mostly saw sand being used instead of salt at that point. Now I don't know how it looks, as it was a couple of years ago, but I expect sand to be used even more now than before, as the country is getting more focused on ecology and sustainability.
Probably a fair few area's in which salt is prohibited for road use due to such things. So sand makes sense and for some that is all they will see in their area.
The city also puts out piles of sand-salt for residents to use, so I usually grab some at the start of the winter. The mixture is easier to store than either sand or salt by themselves. For instance, a pile of salted sand won't freeze solid.
Salt works by freezing point depression. You can throw salt on sheet ice and it will melt the ice, until it gets too cold. Calcium chloride works to even lower temperatures.
Over here deicing is frequently done with brine because it sticks better to the road and doesn't get blown away, so I'm very skeptical about the salt being useless when it's wet.
There are a number of chemicals that will melt ice though not as well as salt. But these alternatives are much more expensive, they get talked about a lot but haven't made a dent in salts market share.
All our county plow trucks scatter gravel behind them. Only businesses seem to sprinkle salt around their entrances.
It's fine if it's wet as long as it can still be spread by the spreader. In fact, there has to be some moisture in order for the salt to lower the freezing point. It can't mix easily with frozen ice that has no free moisture.
"Pre Wetting" salt is actually a tactic used for snow/ice mitigation for this exact reason.
to provide some color, just-in-time doesn't literally mean holding no inventory and perfectly matching inflows to outflows. it means that stores of inventory and intermediate work product are minimized as much as possible in light of the typical mean and variance of a process, but not more than that.
in the case of a town, that means you'd likely size the salt store to be one storm's worth of salt and then trigger a replenishment as soon as a storm is imminent (just in time; that is, when necessity is established, but no sooner). you'd also likely try to deplete the store at the end of a storm season and replenish a storm's worth at the beginning of the next.
Who does that? Salt is used to melt ice, not snow.
>>Raised vehicles like trucks and SUVs ... to avoid getting stuck in the snow.
"Raised" vehicles are not tall because of snow. That clearance is for off-road driving, not snow on a road. Any public road would be closed long before snow became so deep as to actually require a car to have greater ground clearance. If anything, a taller vehicle is more of a liability on a slippery road. The ideal vehicle for winter on road driving is any 4WD/AWD car with some good snow tires and a modern traction control system.
The above is partially tongue in cheek, but there is a point worth thinking about.
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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
In the absence of sane Federal regulatory action, consolidation of suppliers is best addressed by consolidating demand. A state like Minnesota should be forcing cities/counties to use a single state contract and leverage that demand to pull salt in from Canada, Western NY, wherever. Then use multi-state alliances to drive more demand and concessions from suppliers.
The downside is that winner take all procurement will put incumbents out of business, but that will happen anyway.
The worst part isn't that companies go out of business, they probably won't, but that after a few rounds of one big state contract only one company will have the capacity to even bid for the contact. That one big company will then subcontract lots of little local delivery contracts. The one big company will have then effectively replaced the government in that it will manage salt delivery across the state.
It's obviously building an old-school Trust, but under our current legal philosophy, as long the private equity / public companies slowly boil the frog and the commodity doesn't increase in price quickly, there will be no Federal regulatory action.
All of these things are re-treads of what happened between 1880-1920. The cost efficiencies driving profit are about using computer tech to reduce labor and other costs. In the old days, it was spinning machines powered by coal/gas/electricity displacing water or craft work. It's more profitable/lower risk to build a monopoly and slowly implement cost-cutting than to be forced to do so by a competitve marketplace.
Check out the MNLARS project, if you’re interested in another excellent example. Pay attention to the insane dollar amounts involved and feel free to make up your own mind if the people in charge of that project were really that dumb or if there is something more sinister going on.
This is a great state to live in that cares about its citizens, people with disabilities and children. We also have great schools but we do have a large achievement gap. Another thing that bothers me are some of the inequities across counties. We also have a lack of affordable housing like everyone else does.
With respect to MNLARS you can read the report rather than speculate: https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/dvs/forms-documents/Documents/i...
Large complex procurement fails or needs change orders frequently because they are large and complex. Buyers don’t understand what they want and sellers understand what they are told. More bidders often drive prices up.
Commodities are different. It’s driven by volume and competitive process. If 30 salt miners bid, you’re getting a good price. If 2 bid, your only path to better pricing is to go vertical to control demand. State governments are able to do that for this type of commodity. Supermarkets do the same thing with produce, although that was illegal until recently.
Much of this is by design because the companies with the government influence to fix the problem are the ones who created it.
So at the very least, you have to buy a salt mine in the right location. Maybe even start a new one, if the existing monopolists own them all.
Not exactly a low barrier to entry IMHO :)
Dead Comment
My father who had spent a thirty year career at Morton Salt was suddenly out of a job after having the best year in his career. What the young CEO didn't realize is that in one swoop he got rid of some of the top performers while at the same time wiping out the people most responsible for maintaining the company's winning culture.
Within six months the stock collapsed, the young CEO had no answers and was fired. Morton Salt never recovered. They were merged with Thiokol and after the space shuttle disaster that merger was unwound. The once proud Morton Salt was passed around between different chemical companies until becoming part of Milliken's empire. All because of a single action by a young CEO.
Some of the employees sued though my father chose not to be part of the lawsuit because he had moved on. The company lost the lawsuit but I can't find any record of it on Google. I don't think that was a coincidence ;<).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
But on reflection, I would say that this comment misses the point by less than I'd originally thought.
I would argue in response to it that every market-focused topic should include the key externalities associated with the topic.
Between the quick cuts to “here’s a funny photoshop” (said in John Oliver’s voice), it should be a red flag that they aren’t actually balancing out the purpose of an organization or system or how it got to be that way
Its just “system you aren't a part of is bad, we raised awareness, we did it you’re informed!”
Trevor Noah, John Stewart, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, Hasan Minhaj, all do/did it the same
This bothers me. All part of the same polarizing filter bubbles we want to think that only people with different beliefs are in.
Anyone who gets their news from comedians should be laughed at and any comedians who think that they are important should be ignored.
I didn't know all the right news was so non-pejorative. Maybe if they'd add a laugh track it would be more entertaining.
Dead Comment
Source: 3 decades living in Canada, with winter tires on my car 4-5 months per year.
Kind of sensible to require cars have proper tires; also from an insurance point of view.
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.
But, when I had a Miata (small RWD sports car), I did use them and they made the car one of the best snow vehicles I've owned. Better than the AWD Lexus SUV we owned at the time for sure.
Drivers panic on the D.C. beltway the second a snowflake hits the pavement.
Good all-weather tires probably give you better average traction than winter tires in D.C., even in Winter.
[0] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-10/cuot-swt1001...
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110105121137.h...
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Dead Comment
If you live around mountains, the high roads will be icy while the low roads have no snow.
I run winter tires until lows in my area are mostly above freezing, regardless of whether there's any snow on the ground.
Yeah of course this doesn't exist in the US, but if they made winter tyres mandatory surely someone will start this business.
Dead Comment
Winter tires are no help, for instance, when you're on what amounts to a sheet of ice.
They're also no help when you're in 2 feet of snow.
They're a big help at the margins, and it's definitely worth the investment in many, many cases, but they're absolutely no substitute for sufficient road treatment.
And again, yes, they help substantially in 2 feet of snow.
I agree that properly treated roads are necessary, but we treat roads for the lowest common denominator. If we as a population properly prepared (say that three times fast) for poor road conditions, we and our environment would be way better off.
I thought this sounded surprising, salt is used for lots of things, and it'd be surprising if road use was the main one. So I went to look, found a bunch of sources, including [1] and indeed this does not look to be correct. Further down the article acknowledges that indeed only about 40% of salt is used for deicing roads, but it really annoys me when writers knowingly write misleading statements at the top of their piece for "impact".
The article also fails to mention that there are a number of alternatives available if it's infeasible to acquire salt in sufficient quantities, such as CMA[2]. Currently CMA is about 13x more expensive, but that would seem to put some sort of constraint on just how much price gouging is possible, especially as CMA and similar alternatives have a lot of significant upsides, such as much less vehicle damage and environmental impact.
1: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/industri... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_magnesium_acetate
I agree that just writing "40%" would be more informative, but that's not how journalistic writing works, for reasons I don't fully understand.
So, I don’t know what the issue here as the term main use is as you say accurate.
Isn't that the main use then? The article doesn't say the majority is used for deicing. It says it's the main use. Unless there is another use at 41%, then this is the main use.
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I would gladly buy studded tires and chain up if they didn't salt the roads.
I would gladly deal with worse traffic in the winter if they didn't salt the roads.
I would gladly incur a greater risk of harm or death if they didn't salt the roads.
I would voluntarily pay more fuel taxes if they didn't salt the roads.
I would put up with all sorts of shit to get the state to stop chemically destroying my property. And pretty much everyone I know feels the same way.
When people complain about public policy written by people in ivory towers who are unaffected by their own policy this is the kind of crap they're talking about. To see such policy presented as though there are no tradeoffs what so ever just drives the point home.
Edit: Since apparently I didn't leave enough space between the lines for people to read, let me make this clear. I'm doing ok. I my fleet is N=6. I can play musical panel vans and station wagons as needed in order to keep costs down and put the wear and tear where I want it. That insulates me pretty well from vehicle maintenance issues. I can phase a vehicle out by neglecting it and then buy a replacement. Someone driving one old car to their job does not have this luxury. You're caught between several rocks and hard places with regard to transportation options. The state is raising the cost of you dragging your butt to your job and telling you its for your benefit. What's an annoyance for me is a serious financial problem for others.
My last car, a Toyota Camry lasted 12 years without noticeable rust and, for all I know, is still running in the used market. My 2015 Prius is pristine. What "chemically destroying" is going on?
Salt doesn't make sense if you get a LOT of snow and have steady cold weather but for vast parts of Canada and the US it makes sense.
As a previously poor owner of a previously junky car that was previously leased by someone who appreciated salt on the roads ... I also appreciated salt on the roads.
In fact, I was recently back in MN, and my outright-owned, otherwise nice vehicle which did stand to take some damage from salt, but I appreciated when they salted the roads.
The janitor driving a 1997 pile who gets to choose between $1k for a new exhaust or $2k to roll the dice on a replacement vehicle is the person who really gets screwed here.
> I would gladly incur a greater risk of harm or death if they didn't salt the roads.
Let's hope that people around you are smart enough to keep you as far away as possible from local government.
Our ten year old car went from having no rust to having completely rusted out rocker panels in two winters.
Granted, they seemed to rust from the inside out, but over the course of the winter you can watch in real time as the rust spreads and dissolves more of the car.
I appreciate that the road is always clear and passable. That's great.
I wouldn't mind the rust so much except body shops won't touch the stuff. They only want to deal with fender benders and whatnot on new vehicles with fat insurance payouts.
Not much appetite for patching cars up and keeping them on the road.
Perhaps what the author meant by saying that they are a small fleet owner is that they for professional reasons are highly aware of side=effects and negatives consequences of salting roads, things which also hit people who don't have a fleet of cars they are managing.
When you have a fleet, you have more data points than when you only have a single car.
And yes, I've been poor and homeless myself, so I am speaking from an understanding of what it means to be on the edge (and sometimes on the wrong side of the edge).