That seems to be designed to cause trouble. High speed traffic with no way to get out of the lane?
If they’re on glare ice, they may be trying to brake but then just skidding.
I’ve been in a road conditions situation like this, but traffic was fairly slow to start with and there were places to go on the shoulders. I was driving through Albuquerque many years ago in what just looked to me like a bit of light snow; I thought other drivers were going slowly because they weren’t used to snow and were spooked out about it. So with my NY snow-driving skills and my then-unusual front wheel drive car I was cheerfully passing people whenever there was a reasonable opening and I was doing fine until a truck pulled in front of me and I hit the brakes.
At which point I discovered that the reason everybody was going slowly was that we were on glare ice. I managed to avoid hitting the truck by hitting the guard rail instead, which (because there were indeed places to go) brought me out of the line of traffic. The car was still driveable once I pulled the fender away from a tire, so I limped very slowly and carefully off the highway and to the nearest motel, where I stayed overnight until the roads had thawed.
My reaction ever since to slow traffic has been ‘maybe they know something that I don’t.’
Some years after that though still quite a while ago, I was driving on a four-lane road in Pennsylvania. Suddenly with no warning I was going backwards. I realized I’d put my foot on the brake so I took it back off again and the car immediately swapped ends again and slid to a stop on the right hand shoulder, with no harm done except to my peace of mind, which had disappeared entirely. The only reason I’ve been able to come up with is that I must have hit a patch of glare ice on one side of the car, while the other side still had traction.
If there’d been anybody in the other lane at the time when I was swirling around all over the road, things might have come out very badly.
Possible, tho I wonder how likely, if ice is as uncommon there as suggested. In many places, studs/chains are illegal (tho, of course, people break laws all the time).
IME - EVERY time I have been on the road in bad weather, SOME idiots drive as tho the weather/physics do not apply to them. My impression is that many folk do not appreciate what it means to drive too fast for conditions.
The conditions here were likely extreme, but it would shock me if there weren’t at least SOME driver error contributing to the magnitude of the accident.
There was a clip on the 4 o’clock news yesterday (I live in Dallas) that I haven’t been able to find which was taken from farther down the road, and showed about 4-5 cars just sailing up at full speed for maybe 150 meters and crashing into the back of the pack, one car every 3-4 seconds.
Awful doesn’t begin to describe it. The story on the local 10 o’clock news is that there was an extended stretch of black ice (thin, transparent and virtually invisible) for a pretty long stretch leading up to the wreck, and that basically once someone hit that stretch, they were like an unguided missile with no way to stop at 60 mph.
There was also some talk on the news about there being some company who was contracted to do the proactive road treatment on that stretch of highway falling down in their duty, with this result.
This section of the Texas Transportation Code looks like metal studded tires are illegal to use. (§ 547.612. Restrictions on Use and Sale of Tires, for those keeping score at home.)
The relevant subsection:
(c) A tire used on a moving vehicle may not have on its periphery a block, stud, flange, cleat, or spike or other protuberance of a material other than rubber that projects beyond the tread of the traction surface, unless the protuberance:
(1) does not injure the highway; or
(2) is a tire chain of reasonable proportion that is used as required for safety because of a condition that might cause the vehicle to skid.
I am guessing there’s additional guidance that metal tire studs “injure the highway.” Not to mention they’d be of use in Fort Worth, what? Maybe 2 days out of the year, on average? If that?
Salt and sanding the roads looks like much bigger bang for the buck. I wonder if TXDoT did, and how frequently?
It’s not. Nobody has snow chains, much less winter tires or studs around here. We maybe get one day of ice/snow a year in the DFW area, with larger bursts of winter weather like this happening about every 10 years.
So even tho no one coulda forseen these situations, this Yankee was more prescient than all the Texans around him/her?!
Yeah, I agree. But I have long thought that a HUGE percentage of driving is done on autopilot, and it is largely luck that more bad shit doesn’t happen. Testament to the fact that the vast majority of situations on roads ARE predictable.
None of us likes to think we are distracted drivers. But who NEVER looks at a sign they are passing or anything else other than the immediate traffic? Who NEVER eats or drinks, or takes their eyes off the road momentarily to change the radio station? Just lucky a kid doesn’t dart out in front of them at that precise moment.
I’ve long ago gotten numbed to the inherent insanity of hurtling along Chicago expressways at 60-70-80 MPH, w/ no more than a couple of car lengths between each car. NOTHING you could do to avoid an accident if you - or the car in front of you - had a blow out. But people keep doing it, just trusting the odds.
Almost all the drivers had driver error: they were driving too fast. All the Dallas area media were running articles about ice storms, icy road conditions. So drivers knew there was at least patchy ice. In this situation it doesn’t matter the road is currently good–you know it can turn bad in a few seconds. So you drive slowly.
I have no idea. But any major road, even now, probably has occasional travellers on it who aren’t from the area.
Even if we are talking about chains and not studs: someone who routinely carries chains when they’re at home might not take them out of the car if for whatever reason they’re going someplace far from home. They probably just ride around in the trunk all the time.
If multiple vehicles were shown being able to stop, and an occasional one kept on going, I’d be inclined to say that there must have been enough traction to stop and the drivers who didn’t were careless. If one car out of all that mess was able to stop when none of the others did, I’m inclined to say that there was something about that particular car which made it possible for it to get traction when nobody else could. I’d suspect studs rather than chains, even though illegal, just because once they’re on the car it’s a process to get them back off; all the tires need to be changed or re-mounted, and somebody doing an isolated trip to Texas might not have bothered, especially if they were likely to be needed at other points in the journey. Chains are no good at high speeds so even if they were in the trunk they probably wouldn’t have been put on for that sort of road; but I wouldn’t absolutely rule them out.
That is why I purely hate such traffic. I live a life in which it’s rarely necessary to be in it; but although many people are stuck being in such traffic most days of the week, it always strikes me as an essentially stupid situation. Heavy traffic moving slowly? That’s OK, damage if things do go wrong will be minimized by the slower speed. Light traffic moving fast? That’s OK, if something goes wrong with one vehicle there’s a reasonable chance that others will be able to dodge out of the way. Heavy traffic moving fast? Gaaah. It’s impossible to keep proper distance for the speed.
And, on some of those roads, you’d get rear-ended because you were driving slowly: and you’d become the initial car in the disaster.
A few years ago I was driving home just after dusk. It was raining lightly and just as I was coming up to my exit, the cars in my lane all just stopped. Apparently a driver about 10 cars ahead wasn’t sure if this was their exit or not, and their brilliant solution was to literally just come to a complete stop on the highway to think about it. There was nowhere to go; traffic was zooming past to my left, and there was a jersey wall on my right. I barely stopped in time, and it was probably only about 10 seconds but it felt like 10 minutes that I was hearing screeching tires and horns coming up behind me. All I could do was sit there and wait for the impact, but the idiot started to move and I got onto the my exit ramp.
I was pretty furious; for a moment I almost turned off the ramp to chase down the idiot who had stopped, and beat the shit out of them, but just as quickly I figured this person probably wouldn’t survive very long in DC traffic anyways. I just hope they didn’t hurt anyone else doing it.
Yeah - unfortunately, we don’t have enough video. And, I bet that even that guy who stopped got slammed into from behind and driven into the pile.
Like you, I consider myself fortunate that I am able to choose not to drive in horrific traffic. In the Chicago area (and I assume most large cities), it can surprise you. Pre-Covid, I drove maybe 10 miles on 1 stretch of expressway most Saturdays. At around noon, it could be free sailing, stop and go, or the bumper-to-bumper racetrack.
When I moved to a town of 30k for about 3 years, the FIRST thing I noticed was the lack of traffic. Man, that was nice!
Probably someone who remembered the car has this thing called a transmission. If you get right off the gas and brakes and downshift you can dump speed pretty efficiently even in an automatic. You don’t want to slam down into first but going down the gears can help considerably and doesn’t affect your slidiness.
Thorny, my guess is that the car that did find traction, had something like Blizzaks or Hakkapeliitta tires: serious winter snow tires. AIUI, their grip on snow and even ice, is considerably greater than other tires’. And while even Blizzaks seem a touch much for the Fort Worth area, maybe they’re passing through, or visiting from the Panhandle?
Any weather in DFW where chains wouldn’t be ridiculous overkill, I’m staying home. Or not driving on the freeway with them. Great on highways around Tahoe though. (Even if all of the locals used 4wD and snow tires instead.)
@SmartAleq, I don’t have the winter driving experience you do. How does someone driving slow a vehicle down? Doesn’t it require a force to be applied from the vehicle, through the tires, to the ground? (We’re ignoring air drag here.) If the coefficient of friction is really, really low, isn’t the amount of force that contact patch (between tires and ground) can transmit to slow the vehicle, going to be really really small? Whether the force is applied via braking or via the driveshafts through engine braking?
