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Road salt may hurt vital link in freshwater food chain, study says
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Fuck Cars
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Proper snow clearance and de-icing is a vital part of wintertime infrastructure maintenance in colder climates. Icy roads are dangerous to everyone, but perhaps especially pedestrians and cyclists.
On an average year, more people are injured due to slipping on ice (~36000) than in traffic (~18000) in Sweden (where I live).
Obviously it'd be better to have more enviromentally friendly solutions, but this really isn't a car issue. In some areas here they've installed heating under the pavement to de-ice, which avoids salting and is much nicer for pedestrians, though is horribly expensive by comparison.
Just read how here in PA they convinced local governments that fracking runoff was good to put on roads. Turns out it's not healthy.
How anyone thought it wouldn't be harmful - boggles the mind.
Money speaks louder than facts
ItS moStlY sALt
Where I live they just de-ice the road for cars, pedestrians and cyclists can dream about it, and I always wondered why, our cars have 4 wheels, it's not like I'll fall, but my body or my bike is just on two point (one when I'm walking), much more chance to slip
In towns/cities this sort of stuff is handled by the municipality here. Maybe you could send in a suggestion to your local council?
Also, in places where winter tires (not all season crap) aren't the norm, or studded ones are outlawed (pure idiocy IMO) road vehicles are just as susceptible and the danger of not being able to stop. When considering that road vehicles include say a... 50ton cargo truck that becomes a high priority.
We actually had some issues this last winter - truckers from continental Europe (who don't have proper tires) getting stuck and blocking one of our national highways (more than once) in the middle of snow-storms. In one case more than a thousand people were stuck in the ensuing chaos.
Here in Germany studded tires are outlawed almost everywhere and its a good thing.
Where I live we usually only have one or two weeks each year where we have any snow or ice on the road and it usually gets cleared very quickly.
The amount of noise and road damage created by studded tires would far outweigh their usefulness for those 1 or 2 days where the snow hasnt been cleared everywhere yet.
I might get some studded bike tires this winter (those are legal) as roads are sadly cleared much quicker than the sidewalks and sliding a little bit with a car is not as bad as falling over on a bike.
It also isnt as loud as studded car tires and doesnt damage the road as much as studded car tires.
If your country doesn't get winter and negative degrees, it's probably fine - but please do keep your drivers out of our country.
It most certainly isn't safe to be driving w/o proper winter tires (and in fact illegal) in real Scandinavian winter weather and it's usually foreign registered vehicles causing trouble and accidents.
You do have to use winter tires here in Germany when the conditions warrant it, they just aren't studded.
Not sure how this isn’t a car issue since:
Roads cover much larger areas,
Consume area that could otherwise be used for source control of stormwater, and
In my experience, are much more regularly and heavily salted.
Many Nordic countries use gravel as a salt alternative. Pretty sure there are salt bans for private areas.
Trams, railways.
Example from Helsinki, little maintenance needed (like heated switches).
No salt bans in my area at least, but it's only effective above a certain temperature (around -15°C iirc). On sidewalks/bike roads it's usually gravel+salt and on roads only salt. An unfortunate side-effect of gravel is that it (a) needs to be swept up in the spring which adds cost and (b) poses a hazard to cyclists once the snow is gone.
It's usually automatically swept by the rain, and as a cyclist I don't find gravel hazardous: I slow down before a bend and that's pretty much it...
It is all about reduction. Wider lanes need more salt coverage than smaller ones, same for parking lot sizes. More importantly, we could also be treating the salty run off water. Many roads just drain straight into the creeks or waterways, using sedimentation and retention ponds could reduce salinity before entering the environment.
Road salt is really only effect to around -10°C anyways. Having lived places that get some fairly brutal winters, salt isn't even that effective anyways.
Grit/sand mixtures tend to be much more effective regardless of temperature. Winter tires should be mandatory in places that require them (I've seen chains allowed instead of winters in some areas, but I know little about them). Maintaining some snowpack instead of a pavement clear can reduce the freeze/thaw amplification effect of pavement and other road surfaces (though that requires temps consistently below 0°).
Anyways, there are oodles of effective snow and ice clearing and management techniques that don't require salt.
(good point. might want to edit that last word ~~ice~~ -> salt.)
Me proofread good.
This is still a car issue, though. From a US perspective which is extremely car-dependent, all of the following get deiced and either exist only because of car-centric infrastructure or would be present to a much lesser degree without it:
Cutting down on car-centrism in the US and Canada would create an enormous reduction in how much deicer needs to be used here.
this feels like you think car roads just appear magically from nowhere, and are an elemental feature of the world, not a ridiculously bloated maintenance expenditure of literally every municipality in the country.
Being genuinely curious - how do the folks who advocate for the elimination of all personal cars (as it seems by the conversation) see that working in modern society?
The impression, as I perceive, is that the hardcore "fuck cars" devotees would "Thanos snap" and disappear the entirety of the car... society(?) Infrastructure, petrol, private transport ownership, roads... And I'd wager there's a bit of crossover with the "fuck planes" and "ships" as well. I'm not saying that all of these don't bring and have major problems that require big, expensive solutions/changes if we want to remain living. I'm asking: how would you propose dealing with global society that is accustomed to going 75 mph when they wake up one morning and they're now going 2.5 mph?
what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I'm not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.
but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters
yeah, you can whine about "MUH FREEDUMS" but a modern commercial car can't go off road for a substantial length of time. if you've ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it's a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren't. no, shut the fuck up, you aren't. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.
so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train's infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.
plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don't have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it's really that good.
plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can't do that shit in your car. don't talk about self driving-that's not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I've done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak's coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren't great, but nobody in california cares if you're on edibles, and it's not really 'allowed' but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.
okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn't intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don't last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you're not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you're carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn't take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.
we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that's what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that's most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.
trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn't subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don't even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.
I really don't want to hear your counter-argument. if you can't imagine how this is better, you're not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn't shitty, that sounds like it's not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don't have healthcare.
oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.