The amount of salt many places in the Northeast US use is unreal. It's at least partially part of a cycle of dysfunctional political incentives, wherein many of the states that dump millions of tons of salt on the roads should have requirements that vehicles be equipped with winter tires, but adding additional costs and barriers to driving is considered unfair because we've designed so much of our built environment to simply require a car to go anywhere.
So, we have people out there driving around year round on bald summer tires, and to make sure they don't kill themselves or cause major issues, turning the roads "black and wet" with loads of salt becomes the solution.
It's totally unsurprising that the salt is harmful to the environment. I imagine that saving people the expense of winter tires in this way may actually be a false economy, given that the salt rapidly accelerates the destruction of cars themselves and the concrete infrastructure it's applied to.
Politicians largely don't want to touch this issue, I think, because they're often the target of blame when the roads are insufficiently cleared and people have trouble getting around.
As an example: several years ago in NYC, a sudden snowstorm caused devastating gridlock around the city and the mayor was dragged over the coals. In response, for the rest of that winter, whenever there was even a hint of a chance of snow, the city would preemptively put down an extraordinary amount of salt. At one point that winter, I stepped out of my office and the street was completely covered thick layer of salt, which was being pulverized by traffic into a dense cloud that looked like heavy fog. Just walking around the air tasted strongly salty. It never snowed, or even rained, so all of that salt just sat there for days.
given that the salt rapidly accelerates the destruction of cars themselves...
Moving from Indiana to the Pacific Northwest illustrated an amazing difference between salted roads and not. Indiana: right after you buy your car, take it to a "rust-proofing" place to have tar oil sprayed underneath, and inside door panels. Your Toyota will still rust out, but at least it will take a good ten years.
PNW? "How does that late-70s Datsun B210 not have holes in the quarter panels? What's with all these pristine cars from 20 years ago? They should have rusted to the frame by now." And our going-on-20-years-old Toyota/Scion xB doesn't have a flake of rust on it, despite us not taking the best car of the exterior finish.
Now, granted, it could have been in the intervening time that galvanized coatings or whatever have gotten better. But you'll have a hard time convincing me that it isn't the road salt that makes the difference.
As someone into vintage restoration its insane to me that historically having an undercoating on body and frame was considered a luxury feature that companies like Porsche did. US big 3 were like who drives a car more than 10 years anyway? So half our cars are rusted out and unsalvageable even though the engine is fine.
Is it different in Indiana from in the Northeast? I've never heard of someone actually getting a rust proofing treatment on their car. I know that I'm supposed to get a couple car washes during and after the winter season to get the salt off, but that's as much as (or more than) most people do here.
That said, unless it's a particularly snowy or icy winter, the roads themselves are usually clear on any given day (in part due to aggressive plowing and salting during and after storms). So maybe if the difference between consistent precipitation and intermittent big dumpings of snow or freezing rain.
Is it different in Indiana from in the Northeast? I've never heard of someone actually getting a rust proofing treatment on their car.
The difference could also be the nearly 30 years since I've lived in Indiana. :-) Most people I knew got their new cars rust-proofed. But, again, it is my understanding that factory body panels have improved. I don't know the exact difference, but I know that new cars get their panels galvanized in some manner. Perhaps old cars didn't get that treatment (and I'd have to go look up whether that's true or not, 'cuz hell if I know). But what I do recall is that if you didn't get your car rust-proofed, there were some cars that would suffer more greatly than others. Chryslers would rust their rear quarter panels until you couldn't put anything in the trunk (though I think that particular issue might have been water intrusion). Japanese cars would just rust to the frame (exaggerated to illustrate the point).
But these guys (https://www.ziebart.com) are still in business, so it's either inertia from old people like me (because that's just what you do) or body panel rust is still an issue. I do notice that when I enter my Washington zip code into the Zeibart "find a local shop" page, it says there aren't any close to me, so make of it what you will.
I used to live in a place that switched from salt to brine, and brine is much, much gentler on cars. They used to last maybe 5 years, and now 10-15 before the rust gets them is much more common
I know, right? I don't really understand it, but my guess is that the salt crystals (big, pea sized rocks) are more readily stuck into cavities in the body and frames and they sit there forever, where the brine washes off.
I also wonder if the brine is more efficient and uses less salt? No knowledge, just anecdata here
There are cheap winter tires available for 90 bucks a tire in Canada, probably cheaper in the states. There are places that offer financing on tires.
We require insurance which is expensive. There's no excuse not to require winter tires, it's a basic safety requirement. Driving without winter tires is just dangerous.
It doesn't matter how much salt they put on the roads. The issue is that winter tires are made of a material that grips better in cold temperatures where ordinary tires don't grip as well when temperatures drop.
> Politicians largely don't want to touch this issue, I think, because they're often the target of blame when the roads are insufficiently cleared and people have trouble getting around.
I think they don't want to touch this issue because it's really hard to solve.
You can write a law saying all vehicles need winterized tires during that time of year. But how exactly would you enforce it? We already struggle to enforce something as simple as an outdated inspection sticker which can be determined at a glance on the road. How exactly would you enforce something that can't be determined as easily?
Without the ability to enforce this sort of law, reducing or eliminating road salt would result in far more traffic, accidents, injuries, and deaths.
>You can write a law saying all vehicles need winterized tires during that time of year.
As a matter of fact, Quebec already has one[1].
>But how exactly would you enforce it?
The easiest way is probably similar to inspection sticker enforcement: by having the responding officer check the tires whenever a driver goes off the road, gets in an accident, or is otherwise pulled over. No winter tires? Enjoy a fat fine.
Will some drivers get away with it? Of course. You're never going to get 100% compliance. There are still people who live in states other than New Hampshire that still don't wear their seat belts.
So does Colorado [0], though only on certain roads. It's always in effect from September to May on I-70 west of Denver, and the state police can put it into effect on other roads when needed.
Though it's not great in terms of requirements- 4WD vehicles don't need winter tires, and M+S rated tires are considered sufficient on a 2WD vehicle.
I used to run summer and winter tires on my old Mercedes diesel (rear drive). I have a driveway, a garage, and tools (including air tools) and it was still a pain in the ass.
People without that need a place to store 4 bulky, dirty, heavy tires, and a way to get them to/from whomever is going to swap them. People who live in an urban setting would likely find that pretty annoying.
I also drive so little that one set of tires ages out before they wear out. Now, I’d have twice as many tires aging out, which is an economic and ecological problem of its own.
As the other poster pointed out, compliance with winter tire rules is a solved problem, as it is done in Quebec and various parts of Europe. That said, what I was trying to say there is that politicians don't want to touch the "too much salt" issue–not the tires issue–because at least so far, it's been like buying IBM: "nobody gets fired for telling the DOT to go hogwild with the salt". They only get bad press if they're not perceived to have done enough to get the roads clear.
>given that the salt rapidly accelerates the destruction of cars themselves
It's bad, I genuinely may have to drive my car back up to Michigan to get work done because the dealers in the south don't understand that my car really isn't so rusty for having been through multiple Detroit winters.
I think in some sense requiring winter tires is optimal, but I think the heavily car centric transportation introduces other issues. Say you require winter tires, someone loses their job, and now they can’t afford to get the tires or the maintenance to swap them on. Now being poor additionally means they can’t travel very well during the winter, which may even prevent them from finding new employment.
Well, I can't read this because of the academic publishing hegemony. But it reminds me of something interesting I learned recently which is probably related – the concept of saltwater intrusion into aquifers as a result of groundwater pumping in coastal areas.
The density of saline water relative to fresh water makes this a somewhat interesting phenomenon (though of course not for the people who depend on fresh water in their aquifer).
It probably won't be for a long time because SH does this weird thing where they shut down uploads/new papers for a while during some Indian court case, apparently. If you are looking for a paper within the past year and it's not there in SH, don't bother checking back for a while.
Honestly nowadays the Standard Template Construct (an IPFS based, decentralised SciHub) is a better choice than SciHub. You just search the article with an IPFS node running and if it comes up, you can pull it down. If not, if you upload it people will mirror it.
Saltwater intrusion is a serious problem and likely to get more serious with time, as water demand continues to rise with population and residential/commercial/industrial use
The residents of the Adirondacks have been SCREAMING about this for years, and no one listens. The marshes and streams there are being destroyed by road salt use, by a DOT that does not care.
You move to the Dacks because you are OK with a few feet of snow, and a few days of travel restrictions. Destroying that on the alter of the automobile is such a stupidly American thing to do.
As someone who has lived in the Midwest and now in Colorado, and has driven all over the US in all seasons, as well as overseas in various other countries, I /really/ /really/ wish we would stop salting roads and people would instead do proper vehicle maintenance, including swapping to winter tires during winter. There's no nice way to say this, but the big elephant in the room is that in the US cars are essential to daily living to millions of people literally too poor to buy a set of winter tires, and as far as the government is concerned salting the roads is massively cheaper than having proper public transport.
I don't think owning a car should be a luxury item, but there's some midpoint here that we as a society aren't grasping where we not only expect, but nearly enforce, that people too poor to change their oil or have proper tires should still own a car. In societies with good public transport, /everyone/ uses it, not just those of lower economic circumstances, and cars become a less necessary piece of infrastructure that can be treated more as a middle class convenience than a bare necessity, which is basically what it should be.
It regularly blows my mind seeing shit heaps that are clearly unsafe rolling down the highway with paper tags that expired 2 years ago on them, that have clearly never been properly registered or inspected. That should be made untenable in our society, but we cannot do that without also providing a pathway for people to get from where they live to where they work and to community resources. We've painted ourselves into a corner by building car-centric cities, not investing in public transport, and creating a social condition where a small but prevalent portion of society can't maintain what little possession they manage to own.
Salting the roads is only a benefit to folks who don't have a properly maintained vehicle suitable for the environment they are living in. And it's a detriment to everyone else. Salt absolutely destroys cars, it destroys the roads, and it destroys the ecosystem as well.
Too many people on the planet. Global warming, the myriad problems caused by global agriculture, marine fisheries collapses worldwide, and now this shit. Too. Many. People.
The problem is not the number of people, it is the amount of externalities. What has to happen is a reduction in absolute pollution - that can happen either by lowering the number of people (read: genocide) or by reducing the pollution per person. The latter is possible and sustainable. The former is very stupid, because even a "clean" Thanos-style genocide would have essentially no effect; populations would rise again and since we did nothing to solve the problem (pollution-per-person), we'd be back in the same place within a generation or two.
Many countries in the world have transitioned from positive population growth to near-zero or negative population growth, with no genocide. So you're presenting a straw-man (straw-Marvel-villain?) argument about population reduction.
It is indeed possible and sustainable to stop population growth. The thing is, Capitalist economies in most countries are fueled by the pursuit of "growth" - not of population, but of profits/future-profit-streams. When capital has less possibilities for growth by expansion to new people (or, still today, new markets developing) - there is a tendency to for exploitation to deepen. So the lack of the "safety valve" will make existing social arrangements more tense, or even worse, on average. Of course - that's an issue even without getting to zero-growth, as new markets in developing countries are gradually running out.
(Haven't talked about controlled population reduction, to not run on too much in this comment.)
"The problem is not the number of people" Bullshit. None (not one) of the systems/industries we have in place to support our current population operates at anything even close to sustainable. CLothes, food, shelter, whatever, if it's on tier 1 of Maslow's hierarchy the shit we do to service it has overwhelmed or is in the process of overwhelming available global natural resources (renewable and otherwise), with no obvious path to sustainability. It's trivially agreed upon that there are natural carry limits for every other species on the planet. The notion that this also applies to our species shouldn't be controversial, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence that that carry limit has been exceeded.
Other species don’t build technology. Technology changes the carrying capacity. Humans also have environmental impact that varies far more than animals. A bird in Africa and a bird in America probably have similar environmental impact, but a person in Africa uses far fewer resources than a person in America.
Your position should be controversial because it is incorrect. The ecosystem dynamics of humans are nothing like that of other animals.
It's taught that the Green revolution was what broke Malthus, but so far we haven't solved the core problem(finite natural resources), only kicked the can down the road(we can turn crude oil into extra food).
I hate to be so grim, but your position is, "technology has allowed humans to dominate the planet and push up our carry capacity. Externalities are building up as a result of those technologies and they make our enviroment less hospitable. We have yet figured out how to not do that, despite the problem being significantly more difficult now that we are locked in to supporting more people. But we will do it, for sure. "
Is the last part saying that because their are have nots we are fine? You completely ignore the "we don't know how to make basic stuff at the quantities needed in a sustainable way" bit. I don't think banking on the discovery of new technology and having enough coordination as a species to implement that tech in a timely enough fashion is so safe that doubting it should be controversial.
You're right. Birds haven't managed to cause a global mass extinction event. Meanwhile the technology you're touting has permitted our species to very nearly eradicate every marine fishery on the planet, fuck up CO2 levels badly enough to alter the climate globally, pump more water out of aquifers than can be recharged through natural processes, and has driven unrecoverable topsoil loss globally in all major agricultural areas. Your claim that carry capacity has been altered significantly doesn't mesh well with the facts on the ground. Available evidence suggests all we're really accomplishing is a temporary increase in humans on the planet in exchange for a bricked ecosystem. That ain't carry.
It is possible that the evolution of a fungus that could degrade lignin is what brought about the end of the Carboniferous, with an associated extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous#Fungi
None of this is to downplay humanity's role in our current climate catastrophe. But we are the first of a long line of organisms that have the ability to do something about it, which is not nothing.
Right, and the only non-hypothetical, physics-or-economics-defying solution we have available is to get our population down below some threshold where our existence on this planet becomes long-term sustainable.
I’m not really sure what your comment has to do with carrying capacity. The damage humanity has done to the environment has more to do with a minority of the population using an insane number of resources.
Pull your head out, there are no sustainable options that scale. Food production alone takes up something like 70% of the dry land surface of the planet. permaculture/sustainable ag produces at max a third of the calories per acre of modern monocrop ag. So unless you're planning on raising Atlantis a severe reduction in global population is a hard requirement to transition food production to sustainable methods because we dont have the spare acreage required.
Providing better medical care and birth control? Educating the population on family planning? Making the cost of raising children more expensive, in order to create economic incentives to have fewer children?
So, we have people out there driving around year round on bald summer tires, and to make sure they don't kill themselves or cause major issues, turning the roads "black and wet" with loads of salt becomes the solution.
It's totally unsurprising that the salt is harmful to the environment. I imagine that saving people the expense of winter tires in this way may actually be a false economy, given that the salt rapidly accelerates the destruction of cars themselves and the concrete infrastructure it's applied to.
Politicians largely don't want to touch this issue, I think, because they're often the target of blame when the roads are insufficiently cleared and people have trouble getting around.
As an example: several years ago in NYC, a sudden snowstorm caused devastating gridlock around the city and the mayor was dragged over the coals. In response, for the rest of that winter, whenever there was even a hint of a chance of snow, the city would preemptively put down an extraordinary amount of salt. At one point that winter, I stepped out of my office and the street was completely covered thick layer of salt, which was being pulverized by traffic into a dense cloud that looked like heavy fog. Just walking around the air tasted strongly salty. It never snowed, or even rained, so all of that salt just sat there for days.