icy sidewalks - January 14, 2012

I did walk Anya, but then did most of my outside walking today coming home from a sing at Logan Park, about a mile and a half from my house. It was snowing, and we ended up with a really slippery coating of maybe an inch. Still, it's nice to have the frosting on our winter back again, even if it's only for a day. Highs back in the 30s tomorrow...

We also had a bad scare when we realized none of us had brought Anya inside from the car. She could have run away, gotten hit by a car, or been dognapped. But she was just hanging around, sniffing at things, waiting for us. What a great dog.

A friend was going to come over for dinner tonight, but when I went out about an hour before she was supposed to arrive, I found the roads really slick. She decided to try again tomorrow.

When we think of snow-clearing, the first thing that comes to mind is the snow-plow pushing the drifts aside. But for modern drivers, the iciness of the road is at least as important. Losing traction on the roads is in someways scarier than being stuck. The couple of times I've hit black ice and totally lost control are among the most terrifying moments of my driving career, only really breached by the actual collisions with deer and other cars. Yes, collisions. I've only been at fault once, I think, but I've had more than my share of run-ins with other drivers who happened to be having lapses right at that moment.

Winter is a bad time to have a lapse, and especially winter with a coating of frozen water on the road. I notice a little extra focus kicking in, as driving a car becomes just a little more like steering a boat. Response time suddenly lengthens, and whatever move you make with steering wheel or brakes loses the suddenness you've become used to.

No wonder we use so much salt on our roads. And it's only been since automotive traffic began to dominate after World War I that we've tried to keep city streets clear down to the surface. Well, that's not totally fair. The real start to to-the-ground snowclearing was the street car (horse-driven), which had to keep the rails clear. There were some lines that experimented with putting sleigh tracks on horse-cars in winter, but by and large it was individuals who used sleighs, while the bigger public cars remained resolutely on rails, in whatever weather got thrown at them.

But salting... salting is another story. It's only when we began to depend on traction between rubber tires and pavement that people really went to town with combinations of salt, sand and cinders. It's a combination cities continue to negotiate: salt pollutes, sand and cinders create a mess to clean up after things melt, and whatever happens it's the city that gets blamed.

Ice is dangerous for everyone, wheeled or no. I've know a bunch of people who have suffered really serious injuries from falling on the ice: fractures, major muscle tears, sprains that needed crutches... tailbones, legs, arms all are at risk. Even with a mild snowfall on mostly-cleared sidewalks, the less than an inch of snow this afternoon concealed some slippery bits that almost took me down in that mile and a half to get home.

But why is that anyone's fault but my own? If I had the right shoes, with spikes or ice grabby things, like what my wife wears to go running on ice, I'd be fine. If we had cars with treads and ice brakes, like snowmobiles, we'd be fine too, not plowing down to pavement. It's that our technology has been built on one kind of pavement, and we've decided to depend on that kind of pavement being maintained, rather than adapting ourselves and our technology to what happens every dang winter.

Time to put on the boots. Then again, this will probably all melt tomorrow. So never mind.