I find this irreconcilable with my fifty years of driving experience. I’d say that the other posters here are also disputing this assertion. It seems like everyone who defines the term also disagrees with you. There’s a distinct possibility you just might be wrong and not admitting it.
You also don’t need to come to a complete stop before a slippery patch.
Except you know what the temperature is outside and that ice will exist when it below freezing.
Same here. Black ice is extremely treacherous, and while you may know that conditions are right for it to be on the roads, seeing it before it’s too late is another proposition altogether. I remember walking out my front door years ago, looked at what seemed to be normal dry streets in front of my house, backed the car out of the driveway, braked and turned the wheels and slid all the way across to the opposite curb. It’s smug to say that if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. I submit oxygen as my cite.
I also wonder about the folks who claim they never drive fast when the air temp is below freezing.
I lived 20 years in Saint Louis MO. I lived and drove in both the urban core and the outer suburbs. Normal weather there is snow and ice off and on from mid Dec to late Feb. It was 3F/-16C overnight there last night. Which is common a couple days in Feb, but real early this year.
Unless there is fresh snow on the roads, nobody is going below 60 on the freeways for 3 months out of the year. They’re doing 70 to 80 as always. Typical urban/suburban main drags are signed for 45 and everyone is going 45 regardless of the temp. Snow on the ground is a different matter: for that people slow down. To 40/50 on the freeways and 25-30 on the surface streets. Unless it’s actively falling; that tends to get slippery and freeways and surface streets slow to a crawl.
Given what we all know about bridges, the hardover folks here are saying nobody ought to exceed ~25mph any time on any road when the air temp is much below 40F/+5C or has recently been below that temp.
I doubt that the upper half of the United States and all of Canada abide by this “rule.” It certainly never was my experience.
I didn’t say that there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be seen. I said that there wasn’t any ice (or at least, none that would present a driving hazard) that can’t be seen.
In fact, that can sometimes be the absolute wrong thing to do. On my way home from work one morning, the wet sleet started. I got off the freeway and started up the hill toward the back way home, driving a RWD rx-7. It was quite nerve-wracking, but at least the curve in the hill was gentle enough to be negotiable. The guy a ways in front of me in the left lane had enough of that shit and pulled off on the left shoulder. My knuckles were white to the crest, but I made it because I kept going. That guy, halfway up the hill at 4am, would probably be sitting there till mid afternoon, because he stopped. 10mph with almost no traction will still be better than stopped, because once you stop, there is a pretty good chance you will not get going again.
I’m from St. Louis, too.
A couple of years ago, I was interviewing for a job in Atlanta in December. I noticed on the hotel TV that all the local schools were closing for the day. I looked outside and there was what I would call a frost. The ground was hard and the grass had frozen dew on it. As far as I could tell, not a drop of precipitation had actually occurred. But they canceled school anyway.
A few years later, I was working for that same company (but they decided to hire me out of the St. Louis office so I didn’t have to move), and their Houston office canceled work for a couple days because there was less than an inch of snow on the ground.
So I agree that it’s silly to expect people to drive 10mph for half the year, but I can also see why people from warmer parts of the country might think otherwise. They literally never deal with winter driving, and what little snow or ice they see is treated like the apocalypse. And considering their cities don’t own snow plows or salt trucks, they might be right to do so.
I wouldn’t be going 60 if the roads weren’t dry. Luckily it’s less populated up here and I can go slow and people will just go around me.
You are still wrong. I was travelling over a large drawbridge in Lynn, MA in the early 2000’s. It is a steep incline up and down. It wasn’t until I crested the top that I saw what lay in store at the bottom. The was an 18-wheeler jackknifed at the bottom with a pile of cars plowed into it and each other. I obviously hit my brakes but they didn’t work just like they didn’t for anyone else because there was a freshly formed layer of ice on the downhill side. Even with every control I had at my disposal, I couldn’t stop either and could barely steer. I was also speeding up rather than slowing down. I made the decision to put my car into an intentional spin and bounce off the curbs or railings rather than hit the pile of vehicles at the bottom at an uncontrollable high speed.
It was a miracle but it worked. I was able to stop before I hit the bottom by intentionally spinning my car until it ended up sideways. I was able to creep down and around the carnage after that with almost no damage to me, my car or others except for my knocking knees. Good luck getting a self-driving car to make those types of decisions.
If you don’t believe in black ice, you have never spent much time driving in New England. It very real and sometimes appears with no advance warning. You can’t know until you try to turn or hit the brakes and nothing happens.
I guess we now know your superpower. Too bad the rest of us unmutated mortals have no such super-vision. Is it focusable at particular distances like Superman’s x-ray vision?
I can well imagine that in the very near future self-driving cars (as well as conventional human-driven cars) will communicate with one another to a greater extent than they do now, so that you would have advance warning of the danger awaiting you over that hill.
Agreed about warm weather drivers. I was one for the first almost 40 years of my life. Those first couple winters in snow country were … sporty.
What caught my attention was the several people up-thread who claim to be from the suburban or rural far north (New England or Canada) and who claim to never drive above about 25 for half the year. They’re the ones I’m calling out for exaggerating.
It’s not a superpower. When I lived in Montana, everyone I knew was able to recognize black ice, and to traverse it safely once they recognized it.
What is so damned sad and incredibly frustrating to me is this almost instinctive
“How can technology save us from this well-known, happens-every-year weather phenomena?”
Um, kids: This ice occurred long before electricity was “invented”.
In the 60’s, there was a proposal for “automatic cars” - a wire down the centerline, and a sensor loop in the car…
This “black ice” is also known as “glare ice” and a few other regional names in the US.
It is another of those “and kiss your ass goodbye” situations.
Superman doesn’t really exist, and a cheap, reliable sensor would be useless: “Yep, glare/black/kiss-your-ass-goodbye ice”.
“and then a miracle happens, and everybody is safe”.
AIUI, there was a children’s version of Titanic in which the passengers were magically transported from the North Atlantic to a sunny paradise to live happily ever after.
This discussion occurs about every three years: “Black ice doesn’t exist, it’s just an excuse for bad driving” vs “Let’s transport your super-skilled ass into a car facing a patch of newly-formed transparent ice and see how you come out”.
This crap is the #1 reason for studded snow tires on all four. And I mean, real STEEL studs.
Chains would probably also work, but they do limit max speed.
I moved out of “Real Weather” in 1979. Ain’t goin’ back
The above is another “stream of consciousness” dump.
The wire-in-the-road is the usual “How to detect glare ice”. It wasn’t practical then; it’s even less practical now.
“Technology will save us” is beginning to sound like “How to get into Heaven” back in the Dark Ages in Europe - “If we just pray this way, we’ll be Saved” has become “As soon as we invent this device, we’ll be Safe”.
“Safe” meaning simply: will die another day and/or in another way.
Yes, I’m cynical.
Can’t you understand that conditions aren’t the same everywhere? New England and the Northeast in general are known for sudden icing that makes vehicles uncontrollable on untreated roads. It even has a bad reputation for ski conditions when there is too much icing.
I can promise you that black ice exists. Please give up because your ignorance on this topic is pathetic. Montana is not upstate New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire or Maine. Black ice definitely exists here and it is something all drivers need to be educated about. It is like tornadoes in Oklahoma or hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. It doesn’t affect the whole country but it is devastating when it does in certain locales.
I am happy that you have never encountered it in person but I am quite unhappy that you seem to be claiming that other people are delusional. You are normally a bright poster but you are very wrong on this subject. I hope you aren’t so cocky if you ever encounter black ice in person because you will be in real danger of hurting yourself and others.