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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

• sandworm101 6y ago
  >> salt to melt snow 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.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • bluGill 6y ago
    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.
    • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      The ideal vehicle for any given amount of traction is going to look pretty close to the same regardless of the amount of traction.
  • creaturemachine 6y ago
    Tell me you live in SoCal without telling me you live in SoCal.
    • sandworm101 6y ago
      Canada. BC and Alberta, the north bits. Wet mountain snow. -40 prairie winters. Have tire chains in my trunk. Have used them multiple times. Only -13c this morning but was -46c a month ago. Ya. I have done the winter driving thing. I did a bit of it this morning.
• Loughla 6y ago
  >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.
  • Zenst 6y ago
    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.
    • grogenaut 6y ago
      In the Seattle area, which Issaquah is part of, they use Sugar Beet Juice. Theres an interesting little article on it here: https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellevue/unique-mixture-coats-bellevue-streets-before-a-snowstorm/281-a6ad32c0-7082-4fed-ac4c-6da5a9113337 https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/bellevue/unique-mix....
      • ryanwhitney 6y ago
        (To help keep the salt stuck to the road instead of blowing away.)
    • whimsicalism 6y ago
      To me, this is a much more restrictive claim than the original.
    • freewilly1040 6y ago
      How much persistent snow does Washington state get though? The discussion is most relevant for places where snow falls and will stay where it is for months if something is not done.
• closeparen 6y ago
  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.
  • drewzero1 6y ago
    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.
    • drewzero1 6y ago
      Too late to edit, but now I understand why people on here use footnote numbers instead of asterisks. oops
    • organsnyder 6y ago
      My Civic does just fine in Michigan. The only time I got stuck was the one winter I didn't have snow tires.
      • drewzero1 6y ago
        I have a Saturn in WI and have gotten it stuck a few times when I lived on a street that didn't get plowed first/often. The plow would come through the intersection across my street and leave a wall of snow higher than my ground clearance. I definitely got stuck a lot more when I drove my old rear-wheel-drive Mercury with an open differential and similarly low clearance, both on that street and in the parking lot at work before the plow came through. My point was that not everybody here drives a truck or SUV, so the roads do need to be cleared to a point.
  • alkonaut 6y ago
    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.
• pixelbath 6y ago
  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.
• analog31 6y ago
  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.
  • irrational 6y ago
    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?
    • analog31 6y ago
      Plants grow anywhere in the Midwest, just not the ones you want. ;-) Yes to some extent. We actually use the sand/salt quite sparingly, because shoveling usually takes care of things. Just a bit on the front steps, and in a couple places where it tends to ice up on the sidewalks in late winter. Probably the main source of salt is what gets thrown from the street by the plow trucks. The lot slopes down towards the street, which helps, and what happens to the grass on the boulevard, we basically don't care. The weeds seem happy enough. The University of Wisconsin has actually developed varieties of trees that are resistant to salt, and we have those varieties out front. At my workplace they salt more heavily, and have had to re-sod the grass near the walkways. But I think that's the result of several factors, including over-fertilizing during the summer, and maybe having a variety of grass that's less salt tolerant than our weeds. We also don't fertilize or water our lawn.
  • drewzero1 6y ago
• CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
  > 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.
  • kapitalx 6y ago
    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.
  • tnorthcutt 6y ago
    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.
  • indymike 6y ago
    When dry salt is disolved by water, it is brine.
• ink_13 6y ago
  > 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.
  • pc86 6y ago
    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.
    • ink_13 6y ago
      > There's a temperature at which it's too cold for salt to work Sure, brine has a freezing point. > 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. What do you think slush is? It has liquid in it, and that's not molten salt.
    • skynet-9000 6y ago
      > a great deal of the benefit of salt comes from friction as cars drive over it You may have never tossed a handful of rock salt on steps that have a quarter-inch of ice on them and watch holes actually form in the ice within a half hour or so.
      • Green_man 6y ago
        On thin ice, you can watch it form in real time!
      • jjk166 6y ago
        Again, it's temperature dependent. Salt lowers the freezing point of water about 4 degrees (either units). Typically when it snows, it is close to freezing (if warmer it would rain, if much colder there wouldn't be enough moisture in the air for precipitation) so adding salt will melt the ice, but there's plenty of time when it's not in that narrow temperature range.
• clairity 6y ago
  > "...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.
  • drewzero1 6y ago
    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.
    • clairity 6y ago
      yes, good point. we base our statistical inferences on backward-looking data, but the future can change in ways we're unable to fully predict and account for. this illustrates that just-in-time isn't an unalloyed good. it trades off resiliency for cost (and a bit of agility). it also introduces more structural variance in the supply chain, exacerbating supply issues, which isn't obvious on first blush (operations research coursework covers this).
• e40 6y ago
  And sand is becoming a precious resource. I believe it's been discussed on HN before. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...
  • njarboe 6y ago
    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.
• beached_whale 6y ago
  A lot of places are using things like beet juice in addition to sanding.
  • ipaddr 6y ago
    Curious would beet juice create red stains om the road?
    • beached_whale 6y ago
      Ive never noticed that on the roads here. You would think it would though eh, my hands are after cutting them
    • war1025 6y ago
      Could be sugar beet, which is white.
• rmason 6y ago
  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.
• Taniwha 6y ago
  For the non-americans here americans have a very 18thC view of their own geography - the "mid-west" is not in the middle of the west
• jfoutz 6y ago
  My hometown used cinders. About the same as sand, but better at absorbing sunlight. No idea where they got them from.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  It's useless if it gets wet before you use it 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.