It’s Dec. 24 and the world is a classic Christmas winter wonderland. Our resident cardinal flashes by on his breakfast feeder visit.
Sadly, Ontario’s highways present a hazardous, less bucolic scene. It often seems Ontario’s drivers must learn to handle winter from scratch — every year.
Six decades ago, I learned to drive in Montreal and on country roads around the city. Salt was not used then. Snow-covered city streets gradually darkened to beige with dirt; rural highways remained white for days.
Then, Montreal winters featured temperatures between -10 and -30 degrees Celsius; the countryside often dipped to a bone-chilling -40 C. At that time, cars had an engine in front driving the rear wheels. Most drivers, my father included, made do with just a pair of snow tires on the rear wheels.
I was more cautious and put four snow tires on my small car, paying extra to have them drilled for metal studs — 180 studs per wheel. With extraordinary control on slippery roads, I enjoyed watching cars in my mirror following me around curves drive into a ditch. That wasn’t nice, but I was young.
One day, freezing rain glazed my dad’s long, steep driveway with ice. I took him by the hand and we slid, out of control, down to the street. Unable to walk back up, we took the (icy) stairs back into the house. I then sat him in my car, accelerated down the driveway, braked before we hit the street, and then reversed back up to the garage.
“Now, Dad, will you buy studded snow tires?”
“No.”
Nevertheless, I believe he never crashed.
At the time, Montreal had a fleet of huge Sicard snow blowers on special trucks. Plows scraped snow to the side of the street. The Sicard followed, hurling the snow onto people’s lawns.
In 1965, Montreal began to experiment with road salt. Initially, it only salted intersections, but soon expanded to whole streets. People complained that the salt-laden snow poisoned their flower beds, hedges, and lawns.
The city was forced to use its Sicard machines to fill trucks with this snow, and dumped this into the St. Lawrence River. At the time, salting the river didn’t matter; no downstream municipality used river water. (Montreal only began treating its sewage in 1984.)
Another solution to the salt problem would have been to abandon its use, leaving hard-packed snow on the streets. With the low winter temperatures Montreal experienced then, hard-packed snow offered good grip. Also, very cold ice is far less slippery than you might expect.
In 1968, I left Canada to work as a Cuso volunteer in Nairobi, Kenya. After four years in Africa, I accepted a tenured academic post in Britain, and didn’t return to Canada until 1988. The icy, cold winters I knew had gone. Today, Montreal rarely experiences temperatures below -10 C and winter thaws are frequent. Where I used to carve a cave out of the snow berm at the bottom of our yard, Montreal’s snow no longer lasts through winter.
Returning to here and now, Ontario pours millions of tonnes of salt on our roads every winter. Required by law, this is set out in Ontario Regulation 239/02, Part 5.
As a result, Ontario’s roads are almost always wet. Heavy trucks and truck-like light vehicles create dangerous spray in their wake throughout winter, greatly reducing visibility for following vehicles.
More than 40 years ago, European regulations required heavy trucks and buses to install special mud flaps, which reduced the amount of spray by 80 to 90 per cent. It’s a pity similar regulations were never developed in North America.
Meanwhile, tire manufacturers developed special rubber compounds designed to grip snow and ice far more securely than can the rubber in “all-season” tires.
Many of us who experienced studded tires appreciated them for an important characteristic. They had similar grip on all road conditions: packed snow, wet roads, ice, slush, and dry pavement.
Today’s winter tires, made of softer, porous, hydrophilic (“water-loving”) rubber and designed with their distinctive multi-siped (many small grooves) tread design, are almost as effective on ice as studded tires, and easily equal or better than them on snow. Even if studded tires were allowed in Ontario, I am not sure I would choose them over a modern winter tire.
But, back to road salting. This inflicts considerable environmental damage to surface water. The salt content of our own Lake Simcoe has been increasing steadily for half a century, beginning when we started to use salt in a futile attempt to banish winter. Attempts to reduce the application rate (the Smart About Salt program) have had no influence on this upward trend. (See graph below.) Reduction in application rates was simply overwhelmed by urban sprawl, creating evermore roads calling for salt application.
Long before our water becomes too salty to drink (the limit is 230 milligrams per litre chloride; the East Holland River is already there; Hewitt’s and Lover’s creeks are halfway), we will have dramatically changed the spectrum of life in our lakes and streams. Many crustacea, larvae and insects are very sensitive to salt, so they will die off. These are food for our fish and other fauna. If our fish are unhappy with their newly salty habitat, what will replace them? What will our sport anglers think?
We pay a heavy price for our addiction to road salt. Corrosion triggered by road salt forced the replacement of Montreal’s Champlain Bridge just half a century after it first opened — costing more than $4.2 billion. Elliot Lake’s Algo Centre Mall roof collapsed in 2012, killing two people and injuring 20. This was attributed to corrosion due to road salt from cars parked on the mall’s roof.
Bridges across our 400-series highways have been repaired due to “concrete cancer” (salt-accelerated corrosion of reinforced concrete). Cities across Ontario have had to replace street furniture (light standards, power poles, bus shelters, etc.) damaged by road salt. Road salt damages leather shoes and dog paws.
If that isn’t enough to convince us, consider safety. Road salting’s goal is clearing all snow to bare black pavement. While that’s laudable, consider the issues in achieving that goal.
One modern means of applying salt to the road surface is to spray a thin coating of brine solution before a snowfall. The purpose of this is to prevent a new snowfall from adhering to the road. That, in turn, allows a snow plow to remove most of the snow in one pass.
Unfortunately, if you drive on this road before the plow has arrived, your winter tires will grip the snow, but snow pads under your wheels will slide on the road because the snow cannot stick to it. I doubt anyone could compile statistics on how many crashes have been caused by this condition, but I have often experienced it — and have quietly cursed the practice.
In summer, the City of Barrie installs speed bumps on many streets, attempting to slow cars near schools and in quiet residential areas. These are removed before winter; otherwise, the municipal plow would remove them violently.
I would suggest a good way to slow cars is to keep the road “white,” leaving it covered with packed snow. Vehicles with proper winter tires will have excellent grip. Coupled with reduced speed, this should improve safety.
I began writing in a snowstorm and finished a week later in another. The city has not plowed my short street in three days. My small world is picture-postcard clean and white. My top-of-the-line winter tires protect me 24/7; winter road maintenance often doesn’t.
It’s high time for Ontario to require all passenger vehicles to have winter tires, just as Quebec has done for years. Quebec passed such a law in 2008. Drivers must install winter tires between Dec. 1 and March 15. Since then, the number of road deaths on Quebec’s roads has halved.
So, why don’t we do this? If we do, we can also reduce the number of roads to be salted.
And, it is time we require school buses to have winter tires. After all, they carry our most precious cargo.
Barrie resident Peter Bursztyn is a self-proclaimed “recovering scientist” who has a passion for all things based in science and the environment. The now-retired former university academic has taught and carried out research at universities in Africa, Britain and Canada, and is a former NDP candidate locally. As a member of BarrieToday’s community advisory board, he also writes a semi-regular column.
