However, you hardly see any grit/sand on the roads. There's a lot of salt.
Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.
(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)
Do drivers in Finland ever use studless snow tires like Bridgestone Blizzaks, or do they always rely on studded tires.
I live in the US and switch to those tires in the winter and find that they have much better traction compared to the all season tires I have on my other car. Other than icy conditions, does having studs have much advantage over studless. I suspect that the damage to roadways caused by studs could be substantially reduced if more people used studless snow tires in the winter.
In Finland, about 85 % use studded winter tyres, 15 % use tyres without studs. Sweden is similar but somewhat less studs.
Studded tyres are more noisy, and they do eat the road more. They are more consistent - in snow, there's no difference; when the road is clean, studs do slightly worse; when the road is particularly slippery and icy, the studded tyres are much better. However, I can deal with that, so I prefer studless tyres. Last winter I had studded ones because they came with the used car I bought. I'm switching to studless for next winter.
It would be good to reduce the number of studded tyres, but people like them for the consistency. However, it wouldn't be good if all switched to studless tyres, because then the roads would sometimes become extremely slippery and polished. The studs remove the ice so that main roads become safer also for studless tyres. I think that a ratio of 30 % of studded tyres would be good for the whole.
If everyone had studless tyres, there would need to be substantially more salt and grit on the roads, and then there would again be more dust and damage to waterways.
(Currently we can see the polishing impact on bus stops: buses are heavy vehicles which do not have studs, and they sometimes get stuck on bus stops at a slight uphill, as the area is polished ice, while everyone else drives by normally.)
Wow. I live within the USA snowbelt, but studded tires are pretty uncommon outside remote undeveloped areas and mountainous areas. Studless (or unstudded, studdable) winter tires are very common in the winter. Poor or clueless people or those who don't drive much will use all-season year-round. Studded (and obviously even winter) tires are very much a regional thing, but studded tires do very much eat the roads and are regulated or banned on many roads.
We do use a lot of salt. I don't think rock salt is much of an environmental concern. It can kill plants by the roadside until it's flushed out of the soil, but the roadside is already a degraded environment for flora. Normal rock salt is a natural material.
What's worse is that some towns will use raw "frack juice" as we call it for deicing roads. This is a mixture of water, salt, and chemicals that spits out of gas wells in the hydrofracking process. Often they'll just remove some of the water to concentrate a brine and apply it to roads as well. There is unbelievably little oversight, it's done on a local level, the chemicals are considered an industry trade secret and god knows what they're spreading around in those communities that allow this to happen.
Where I live (Finland) we have lots of sand but much less salt. The salt use is diminished to protect the environment, but the sand eats the road, as well as the studs most people use in winter tires.
(Yes, we change to winter tires in the autumn and summer tires in the spring; this seems to be an unknown thing in Britain or France and even a bit of snow produces a mess there. Germans have non-studded winter tires which work fine with the amount of salt.)