• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m not unsympathetic to the fuckcars movement, but I have to ask about the road salt. When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? We can be using beet juice and other less impactful de-icing brines, but you still need the cars to get people where they need to go. Is the argument that people should stay home? Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated? Busses need the road salt, too. Trains and trolleys de-ice their tracks. Even urban areas where you can walk everywhere need to salt the sidewalks.

    • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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      1 year ago

      Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.

      And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.

      edit: clarification

      • KnightontheSun@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When I lived near a volcanic area, they used the cinders for winter grip. Played hell on car paint. So, add that to the runoff.

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And even when salt is used, cars need a lot more salt per person than other modes of transport does.

        Can I get a source on this? I’m not even sure what you mean by it, because salt clears active roadways as much as it does backroads, so how is this being measured “per person”?

        Where I live it’s common to spread gravel on the snow to increase grip. And then, of course, it is expected that everyone has the appropriate shoes and bike tires to not slip.

        You’re talking about pedestrians, but what about non-pedestrian traffic? The roads are more than just avenues to get to the grocery store, they’re also how the grocery store gets stocked with goods for rising out storms. It how the ambulance gets to you.

        And what about the disabled or elderly? Can you get a wheelchair across the gravel?

        • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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          1 year ago

          This picture comes to mind:

          For pedestrians and bikers, you need a lot less surface to deice, plus the lower speeds means it is not quite as vital to see all the snow gone directly. And yes, you will need roads for different purposes, but you would need a lot fewer of them, and with fewer lanes, if everyone wouldn’t take the car. Also, for supplying stores, a lot of the things trucks do can easily be done by trains.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If it’s cold enough to freeze the ground, I’m not riding my bike. First, having the right tires is one thing, but black ice and surprise potholes will eat your snow tires. Second, it’s going to be too cold to be out in the cold air for the several hours you need to bike to school or work.

        Busses require the same amount of roads as cars. So you’re going to need the same amount of salt for busses. You might need less for sidewalks, but that’s only because people cannot walk as far as they can drive.

        • Masimatutu@mander.xyzOP
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          1 year ago

          If everyone who normally takes the car would switch to taking the bus, all of a sudden you’d only need one lane in places where you previously needed two or three, because cars are very space-inefficient, so that makes a big difference.

          Also, it’s not quite true that they’d require the same amount of roads. I don’t know about where you’re from, but where I live buses use about a quarter of the roads and you can still easily get anywhere by bus.

          Additionally, salt isn’t used for rail vehicles at all.

          • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I think public transit is important, good for the environment, and should be a much larger budget item everywhere.

            But your math simply isn’t true everywhere. You can’t take 20 cars off the road and put them all on a bus, because those 20 cars aren’t going to the same place at the same time. Urban areas that already have busses blanketing the city and running constantly, the math works and you just need additional busses to up capacity. But for where I live, on the edge of suburban and rural areas, you’d need a thousand more busses on the road to cover every route and destination. And these are places where most roads are only one lane in each direction. The major highways would still need several lanes because of the additional busses to fill demand for additional routes, and smaller roads would need to be widened in many places to allow for the larger turning radius of a bus.

            So you need the same amount of salt to cover the same amount of road. Maybe some areas could recapture a lane or two for bike lanes and pedestrians, but you still need to salt those, and they won’t have the benefit of being driven upon, which crushes ice and moves it out of the way. One or two slip and fall lawsuits later, and municipalities are just going to close them any time there’s a little snow.

            Once again, I’ll say that the argument against cars is compelling. We should work to provide more public transit, because it is better for society to have reliable public transit. We should protect bike lanes, because it is better for our health and the environment, and encouraged freedom and development for adolescents. We should make more residential areas walkable because it is better for communities to be walkable. It fosters relationships among neighbors, encourages the support of local businesses, and improves the health and wellbeing of everyone who lives there.

            Those are the arguments that get you there. Talk about the good it does, not the bad it doesn’t. People who don’t already agree with you will pick the one thing that doesn’t ring true and key in to ignore and dismiss the rest.

    • theluddite@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?

      This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.

      Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.

      So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.

      This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.

    • planetaryprotection@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I think the argument is that you shouldn’t need the cars to get people where they need to go. This can be addressed two ways: either we don’t use cars or we don’t need to go (as far).

      People should be able to travel with other modes that require less salt to deice, and cities could be built to not require cars for most trips. Salting sidewalks and bus lanes is better than salting those things plus roads and highways.

      It’s also worth considering that yes, people should be able to just stay home. People shouldn’t be at risk of losing their job/home because they couldn’t safely make it into work. Parents shouldn’t have to rely on school as daycare.

      I’d be curious to see if urban heat Island affects salt use. Maybe if we build dense enough, we don’t even really need salt to cover 99% of the population.

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So…the issue isn’t cars, it’s capitalism? All we need to do to get rid of cars and all their negative effects is rearrange our country on a socioeconomic level?

        • thatsTheCatch@lemmy.nz
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          1 year ago

          Yes, capitalism is the root problem. Some people argue that you cannot overcome climate change under capitalism (and neoliberalism, specifically).

          But I think it’s unlikely we’ll be able to change the underlying system without society collapsing in some way. Or a revolution.

          However, I don’t think you have to get rid of capitalism to reduce cars and make a positive impact. Climate change is a scale: the more we do now, the less bad it will be in the future. So doing something is still better than nothing, even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.

          Reducing cars (and therefore emissions) can be helped by improving public transport and increasing the number of options for transport. In many places, cars are the only way to get anywhere, especially in countries that focus on car infrastructure. Having the options to bus, train, bike, walk, or drive will reduce the number of drivers. In the case of bike lanes, at least in my country, there is evidence that adding bike lanes increases the number of cyclists (and therefore decreases the number of cars on the road). “Build it and they will come,” if you will.

          I have a car, but I most often bike or take the bus. We can’t get rid of cars entirely; there are reasons people need them (tradies needing vans with their equipment, certain disabilities needing customized transport options, courier parcel delivery, etc.). But reducing the number on the road at any time is helpful.

    • Stamau123@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In Colorado we spray ‘sand’ which is still a chemical mix with actual sand, but less disruptive

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This incidentally is why used school buses from Colorado are highly desirable in the skoolie community (a skoolie is a used school bus converted to a motorhome). In addition to the generally high-quality transmissions and retarders (essentially for handling mountainous terrain), the “sand” you use doesn’t promote rusting-out of the bus bodies like road salt does. In a sense, though, this is still bad for the environment: the extended lifespan of these vehicles keeps them on the road spitting out carbon dioxide longer then they otherwise would.

    • echo64@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think trains de-ice anything, no one’s out there deicing train tracks - they are far too remote