• nyan@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    I grew up and learned to drive in one of those parts of the province that are too cold sometimes for salt to be effective (up on the Arctic watershed), and it isn’t quite as simple as you might want to think.

    In deep January cold, most roads were sanded rather than salted . . . but that only works if you’re dealing with snow rather than ice. The gravel gets incorporated into the snow as it packs down, resulting in a less-slippery surface (although it still isn’t great), but on ice, it slides right off. When you have to deal with ice during the slightly warmer periods, you need a melter. Guess what the cheapest one is? It also has one of the widest temperature ranges over which it remains effective, so it’s the most likely to work after an abrupt flash-freeze. They use a lot less salt up there than they used to, but the MTO still has to go through many tons of it every year to keep the highways open. Without it, it would be possible for some towns to be isolated for weeks.

    Add to that, drivers who aren’t familiar with the conditions. Especially commercial drivers. Highway 11 has been having really awful problems lately with transport trucks being involved in various sorts of accidents. And to be honest, there tends to be a bit of a fender-bender period around November where some of the locals have to regain their winter driving skills.

    There should probably be tighter guidelines on where, when, and how to use road salt, but completely eliminating it throughout Ontario is probably Not Practical right now.

    (And by the way, that gravel? Also a pollutant of sorts that has to be cleaned up when the thaws come. On the highways it eventually becomes one with the gravel shoulders, but in town it has to be swept up and carted away so that it doesn’t block the storm sewers or anything like that. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.)

    • cecilkorik@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      I understand that it is not as simple or practical as I would like it to be, but I am also saying we need to start making concrete steps towards making it more simple and practical by changing a lot of the really ignorant, short-sighted and stupid ways we do things because we seem to be convinced these are the only ways we can do things.

      We need to make policy and infrastructure decisions that actually support sensible, sustainable goals besides just maximizing efficiency and therefore profit for companies that insist they are “providing jobs and important services” as if nobody else could or would figure out their own ways to do that if they weren’t deliberately taking up all the oxygen in the room to starve out any competition or actual innovation. Not every solution to every problem needs to be the cheapest fucking solution that ultimately only benefits huge corporations that have governments tripping over each other to give so many tax breaks to, that they don’t pay taxes anyway, so that we can have an economy designed to concentrate as much of our wealth as possible into the largest number of billionaires we can possibly make.

      My point is we can choose to start doing things differently, start building an economy of sustainability and resilience, giving people back the local services and supplies that monopolistic “efficiency” has stolen from them so they don’t have to travel so far afield or rely on constant long-haul deliveries so much, pursuing different numbers that are more meaningful indicators of actual improvements to the lives of the people in this country.