Is the Highways department as frugal, with salt, and sand for winter roads in your area as they are up here in B.C Canada?

Sorry there are a couple of questions in this one, feel free to answer any or all of them.

In my area, they generally do a decent job with salt and sand.

I work for a union and we say all the time that privatization does not work. Corporations are in business to make money. They don’t make money by being generous with their services or products.

they usually use salt only for roads, and sand and gravel for the pavement.

@jca Totally agree, to hire a for profit company to take care of road maintenance is idiotic if they can get away with not putting enough salt and sand down,that means more cash in their pockets,mean while innocent people are getting killed on the icy roads.

Where I live, in a plains state, they salt the highways and on occasion put sand on them. In the city where I live, they put sand on the mainly traveled streets and on the side streets, you are on your own. Snow plows do a good job on the highways and keep them open. Once in a while, during a major blizzard they close the highways. The state is in charge of keeping the highways open and the city is in charge of the city streets.

The pressure to privatize public services is relentless, and just what one might expect in the transfer of wealth from those who work to those whose “work” is now mostly about transferring that money to themselves. Privatization is an undisguised attack on the last remaining refuge of the middle class – civil service. The argument is advanced that the public sector (government) is so profligate and inefficient that the private sector can perform the same services at considerable savings and turn a profit as well. In reality the schemes invariably boil down to the substitution of a work force possessing decent wages and benefits for one with neither, while a hefty portion of the “savings” is routed to the pocket of the privateer. 40 years of depressed and stagnant wages have resulted in the peculiar situation of civil service jobs standing apart from the travails of the private sector. The embarrassing and glaring discrepancy is understandably in urgent need of explanation lest the suckers believe what their eyes and common sense should tell them. The problem (we are told) is not that the rich are pocketing the former wages of people who work. The trouble is that greedy civil servants and their pillaging unions are looting the public treasuries. It’s a handy trick relying on the rock solid and cynical maxim that “misery loves company”.

We worship my highway department superintendent. The township is 48.8 square miles, contains slightly fewer than 1700 people and a sprawl of 62 miles of roads, mostly secondary and dirt.

We pay very (very) high property taxes, most of which goes to salt, sand and plow the roads. Half of the community would be trapped if the roads weren’t driveable during the winter.

(its weight)

@stanleybmanly super great ,to the point and oh so true answer.
Our right wing friends would disagree,but the ones that do disagree don’t have to drive on poorly maintained winter roads, or if they do,they would see that your answer is spot on.

@gailcalled yeah if the government wanted to waste my tax dollars I would have no problem with them doing it on winter road maintenance .

Around here we don’t consider it a waste but a vital necessity. It’s grass roots…the localist of local government. We bump into the superintendent at the supermarket and can compliment him or complain while at the checkout line together.

@gailcalled It should be a vital necessity up here as well,the highway I use is the main highway to the central interior of b.c and they barley put any road sand or salt on it any more,cutting back in order to improve profits I guess, but at the cost of human lives.
Privatizing road maintenance is and always was a joke.

A very disgruntled Fed Ex guy just knocked on my door, having gotten his truck stuck twice on my .3mile driveway, plowed three times. He finally extricated himself, backed down to the main road and walked up. Fed Ex gave him a completely incorrect phone humber for me.

There is one really bad curve, sharp and canted. You drive down in first gear, the two right tires in the right-hand ditch; and up with just a teeny burst of speed over 50 feet but you have to know which 50 feet. This poor guy got screwed.

@SQUEEKY2 : My daughter lives in Squamish and drives regularly to and from Vancouver. I have not heard her complain about the road condition. I will ask her. She grouses about the rain rather than snow and ice.

That area gets more rain than they do ice and snow, same as Vancouver and the island ,on occasions ,when they do get the white stuff and ice all hell breaks out,accidents go through the roof those drivers down there are totally clueless about driving in it.

This past week it was just a skim of snow, and I met a snow plow that peppered the side of my car with salt.

Here in the Midwest US it’s a race to run your snow removal budget out as fast as possible. That will increase next years budget. Which, of course, must be spent.

@ibstubro

That may well be true of other Midwestern states, but Michigan is the notable exception. It is notorious for very little or no road maintenance. For a state with as much northern area and snow, this is simply inexcusable.

My first winter was a rude awakening indeed. I was used to the experience of @gailcalled, having been born in and spent much of my life in NY.

And the New England states as well as PA. are equally conscientious about road maintenance.

Returning here from a wintertime trip back to Philly was eye opening. I didn’t need to read road signs to pinpoint which state I was in as I went from east to west.

Pa. Roads were great, Ohio began the deterioration, and the moment I crossed the line into Michigan, I had a hard time not fishtailing through slush several inches deep on a completely unplowed road. (and this was on the main artery)

I swear, @Buttonstc, around here the the more the threat the greater the activity. The snow plow will spread salt in front of the house every 30 minutes. Heavy snow? We might not see a plow every 2 hours. The budget must be spent, or it will be reduced. They get at spending the budget ASAP. Ofoen they run out of money before there has been a significant accumulation.

They do a good job here. They don’t use salt and gravel though. They use some chemical like calcium chloride, or magnesium chloride or something.

(which is salt)

(Oh. But it isn’t granular. It’s a liquid.)