In this interview, one truck driver says that the roads were fine before that.
Another article states:
Romero wrote on Twitter that the Fort Worth Fire Department “had to bring their own salt & sand just to access the scene.” The tweet was one of several Thursday raising questions roadway safety.
“Who was responsible for safety on this roadway?” Romero said, calling for an investigation into the crash. “Who was responsible for deicing this portion of our highway? Who dropped the ball and why? Does TxDOT oversee safety measures on tollways or do we just trust these private companies to handle it?”
Lots of drivers belatedly discover they don’t know how to drive on ice…those big rig crashes though make me think something bigger was happening. Someone forgot to salt a stretch of the road? Yeah that would do it…
Okay. The newest car I own is an '02 AWD Subaru which is pretty sure footed but I put well over 175K miles on my '89 Chevy van driving delivery courier in Oregon where black ice is a pretty common occurrence and I can assure you that downshifting will slow that thing down great–way better than the non-ABS brakes will in almost any slidy condition. Then again I tend to load several hundred pounds of this and that over the rear axle to help with traction so I guess you can say I’m kinda old school.
Pumping the accelerator? I can’t think of any situation where that’s a good idea. If you’re in really slick conditions, you should be doing the opposite and feathering the accelerator. That said, a relatively modern version of traction control will do that for you, more or less. I still think it’s a good idea to be gentle with the accelerator do the traction control has you working in partnership instead of fighting it.
My previous BMW had excellent traction control. Despite having wide, performance tires on it and being rear wheel drive, in the rare snowy, icy conditions we’d get in Seattle, I could just mash the gas pedal to the floor just for laughs, and the car would juuuust crawl away from a stop.
You must not have driven in the Sacramento area. They will not ALLOW proper distance. If there’s more than about two car lengths between two vehicles, someone WILL shove in there.
They’re also even more idiotic than usual in rain (even bus drivers agree with me about this). In what halfway sane universe does rain mean “speed up”, and what is with the allergy to use of headlights in poor visibility?
Yes, that’s what I meant by “it’s impossible to keep proper distance for the speed.” The reason it’s impossible (not only in Sacramento, where I actually haven’t driven) is because somebody else will push into the space.
This is the US. It’s quite possible 99% of the cars in that smash up had a automatic transmission. Semis are different, of course.
Unless I misread, this wasn’t on a hill, and the road looked flat on the video on the opposite side . That’s the cars that were spinning tires, not the crashing cars. On icy roads, flat or hill, spinning your tires at 40mph while standing still is the beginning of the end. You may as well drive right into the ditch.
I drive this stretch of freeway every month or so when I’m heading north out of town. It’s pretty flat, but as I said before, it undulates. You can see maybe an 1/8th mile in spots, but it’s not giant stretches of board flat ground.
And again, it transitions from being on the ground to being elevated in a way that kind of makes it non-obvious that it’s doing that, since it’s in the middle of a very wide stretch of concrete. Two lanes in the middle for each of the north and southbound express lanes, and three to four on each side, depending on the exits. But, it’s crossing the west fork of the Trinity River at that point, so it’s always been elevated. I notice it, but I’ve been driving that section of freeway on and off for 35 or so years, and I’ve seen every bit of it’s evolution.
So, add together the fact that everybody had been driving on what just looked and behaved like wet roads, the highway becomes elevated in a kind of invisible way, and the precipitation was not heavy enough to even ice a vehicle that had it’s heater on, and you have a recipe for this. As far as I can tell our precipitation on that day was listed as a trace by the National Weather Service, even my car which was parked outside had a glaze of ice that I could remove with my bare hands after just a few minutes of running the defroster. I went out that morning a couple of hours after the incident to get stitches taken out. Most of the roads were merely damp, if that. I spun the tires on a couple of patches of non-elevated road, but that was it.
I still can’t quite explain the vehcles that were able to slow to reasonable speeds only to become the material between the hammer and the anvil. I see it as very possible they’re the folks who wisely slow down when the temps and road conditions allow for the possibility of ice on the road, and don’t wait for confirmation by losing traction. Usually it serves them well, in this case it seems that there were very few clean escapes.
Add to all of that the fact that the emergency responders were having difficulty reaching the scene due to the ice, and that the road may have not been treated, and it seems like it was an amazing recipe for this nightmare. It’s supposed to do a repeat of this kind of weather tonight - patches of freezing drizzle. Sunday we’re supposed to get honest snow, which will probably be beaten into cobblestone ice in a day or so because we don’t have the snow removal equipment (because it happens once every decade), but it at least advertises “this is going to suck” in a much more clear way.
I think this is most likely. My car lights up an alert when the temp is 39F or below, as there is increased chance of ice. Sure, it is nice for municipalities to ice/sand, but would be even nice if drivers acknowledged that bad weather potentially affects them, and didn’t just barrel along.
That’s still 700 feet. The only reason to not be able to stop is driving too fast for conditions. Many of those cars were stopped undamaged or fender bender type collisions. Even the front semi in that video almost stops without hitting anyone. The semi that crashes at full speed is simply driving too fast.
From my experience quite a few semi drivers think as long as they are carrying a load they are immune to any kind of weather because of the weight on the wheels. Kind of like people who have 4 wheel drive think they can drive any way they want on icy roads.
Is this right? I thought they brought sand/salt with them to use when they got there, not that they couldn’t get there wi
thout it.[quote=“eschereal, post:94, topic:932717, full:true”]
I am not seeing that. NTTA is a private company?
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Is that normal in Texas? Why would a company build a public road and do upkeep on it? Where’s the profit in that?
The express lane(s) have a toll, which appears to be managed by “Texpress”. It is touted as a faster way through town, which explains at least the reluctance to slow down. And the reluctance to close that stretch, because, revenue. From what I can see, though, it is publicly owned, by a regional co-op-like entity.
I think we are separated by a common language. When I say public road I mean a road built and maintained by the government. Pay roads like tollways are a different thing. While you may have to pay to get on a government road the government is still responsible for upkeep etc.
Is this road built and maintained by the government or by a private company? Or some kind of hybrid thing.
we were reading this and someone posed a question “wouldn’t most of the semi drivershave driven through snow ice ect before ? unless that’s all in state aka " local” hauling ?
By definition they were driving too fast for conditions; if they couldn’t stop on those road conditions, then whatever speed they were at was too fast.
The question is whether they could reasonably have expected those road conditions. If everybody drives at three miles an hour every time there might just possibly be ice on the road, nobody’s going faster than that for months in some states.