I really doubt anyone had chains. I’d be more inclined to think that truck was already going slower and knew how to drive in these conditions.
One problem was the ice was not everywhere. I was watching the radar the night before and the rain was happening in small patches. I live about 14 miles from where the crash occurred and the only ice I saw was puddled on shrub leaves
Tell me about it. I don’t drive in these lanes - they’re toll and I’m cheap - but they look really dangerous after seeing this
I"m not SmartAleq, but I’ve got lots of winter driving. As soon as you reduce the energy being applied through the engine, the vehicle will slow down. It’s got accumulated speed, yes, but its also got a lot of weight. Even on ice, it will slow down - not as fast as braking, but it will. (Given the weight of a vehicle, and the natural unevenness of the road surface even with black ice, I don’t really buy the “car is a hockey puck” idea.) Whether you’ll slow down enough to prevent an accident will depend on how fast you were going.
The real concern about ice is that if you brake or accelerate, you will lose control. Slowing down on ice is best done by decreasing the amount of energy you’re putting into the system, and keeping a very light hand on the steering wheel. You don’t want wheel lock (less common with ABS, but can still happen in the right conditions) and you don’t want the wheels to turn too much to either side, because then you’re far more likely to lose control in a skid.
One more thing. The people responsible said they pre-treated the lanes on Tuesday, which I assume means sanding. One video I did see sand on the road. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the sand had migrated to the sides and the smart drivers moved to the side to get more traction
Possible. There are new types of winter and for that matter of all-year tires on the market – I’ve actually got the new type of all-weathers on my car, though they’re Goodyear Assurance WeatherReady; but they do claim to have some traction on ice. I haven’t had them long and avoid driving in bad weather most of the time, though, so I don’t know how well they actually grip on ice – and prefer not to find out, certainly not in the sort of situation that started this thread. Maybe if there’s sheet ice on parts of my dead end road I’ll try them out sometime; though I don’t generally go anywhere till after the sand truck’s been.
I get that, I do that, and wrote a brief anecdote upthread about my time on an iced, poorly-treated road. I’m just quibbling with the idea that engine braking is going to be sufficient or meaningful in a regime where there just isn’t any traction, like the Fort Worth situation evidently was.
It’s preferable to decelerate as gently as possible, and engine braking certainly can help with keeping the tires rolling—and therefore maximizing the amount of force they can transmit—vs sliding.
Video of The Tire Rack illustrating differences between summer, all season M+S, and non-studded winter tires: all on a hockey rink to show slow speed differences in grip. The winter tires’ performance was dramatically better. As you’d expect.
Yes, the tires make a big difference. The first new car we bought came with all season tires. Frankly, I thought that billing them as “all season” should have been a consumer protection violation. We got proper winter tires.
Can’t remember what brand of winter tires we currently have, but they’ll stay on our car until April.
The Weather Channel had a segment on this. It was elevated, which let cold air in under the roadway, and it was also concrete, not asphalt. So driving that was more or less safe before this segment became deadly.
My conference was in the Ft. Worth convention center for two years, so I feel for the people caught up in this disaster.
You’re not wrong; but the OP pointed out that “the express lane is one lane with concrete barriers on both sides,” so driving slower than what appears to be necessary is going to piss off a lot of people behind you who have no way to pass you.
We moved from Massachusetts to Arkansas. My dad continued to keep snow chains in the trunk of both cars. He already owned them and had experience putting them on. There was no reason not to keep them in the trunk.
My mom was an essential worker at the local hospital. She often carried a beeper. Weather didn’t matter; she had to respond. Emergency Surgery can’t wait. Dad put chains on her car several times.
Watch the people in the video that are in the lane next to the cameraman, look at the road and watch the idiots spinning their tires. The ice is clearly visible on the road, so no black ice argument. Don’t spin your tires on ice. Take your foot off the brake and your car will ease forward, then slowly apply gas. It works every time.
That’s not true unfortunately. Whether you are downshifting or braking, it is the friction between the tires and road that actually slows the car down. If you use engine braking, the engine is slowing the wheels through the transmission and the wheels slow the car via tire/ground friction. If you use the brakes, the brakes slow the wheels and the wheels slow the can via tire/ground friction. If you have no friction then engine braking and downshifting ain’t gonna do anything useful.
Exactly. If your car is relatively modern and has anything a little better than the very first ABS instances, the best, most controlled stopping power will come from hitting the brakes and letting the computer work it out. And if the ice is too slick for ABS to help, engine braking isn’t going to magically be better.
If I’m understanding correctly, yes, traction control essentially does that. If you’re on pure ice, though, it’s not going to do a thing. I believe essentially the way it goes is that if it detects slip in the wheels, it reduces power until it does not detect any more slip. If there is no such point, then essentially no power is driven to the wheels (at least that is how my traction control seems to work, having been stuck in the ice last week here in Chicago trying to get out of my alley.) These cars usually also have an option to turn off traction control, so if you want to spin your wheels and try to rock your car out of a snowbank, you can try.
Yeah, and in a car without traction control, it often helps in a manual to start it in second gear to reduce torque to the wheels and therefore slippage (also in automatics in which 2 locks it to second gear and not limits it to 2nd gear – numbered gears work differently in different automatics.) Depends on how torque-y your engine is, though. My old Mazda 3 without traction control was a bit punchy in first (or perhaps I’m just heavy footed), so 2nd in snow helped a lot.
I said truck drivers. In other words, guys with CDLs with big rigs like the ones driving in the spectacular crashes. They’re trained to a higher standard than the average driver, spend hundreds of hours on the road every year, entrusted with valuable cargo, and their mistakes could trigger big lawsuits. Ordinary drivers lose control on ice, sure, but truck drivers are a different animal. What happened?
High-cost trucks are now available with automatic braking, which optimizes fuel costs by slowing down before braking is required, under computer control rather than driver control. Has such made much of an entry in the American truck market?
Could just be physics. Trucks without trailers are already 7-15 tons by themselves; with a fully loaded trailer it could be triple that, or more. That much momentum, the driver has a surprisingly tenuous grip on control even in good conditions.