California drivers make me experience violent impulses. It’s not that I don’t understand them. I do. I lived in CA for 8 years–the bulk of my driving life was in So Cal. For one thing, CA drivers are accustomed to driving at CA speeds. I never thought anything of doing 85 or 90 mph on the freeway, as long as I kept up with traffic and didn’t pass the CHP doing 95. So immediately, Utah is a totally different experience. Everybody here drives like they have nowhere to go and all day to get there. So for people fresh from CA, it must seem like Utahns are literally moving in slow motion. After the snow starts flying, it must get 10x worse for them, right? Because most Utahns do slow down to the appropriate speeds when the roads are bad.
We’ve had a bit of snow, but yesterday was the worst of the year. It snowed all night and all morning until about 2 in the afternoon. There were accidents every fucking where. Traffic was a mess all day. I can’t prove, obviously, that they were all out-of-staters, but it was clear that they had all been driving way to fast for the conditions. People who don’t know how to drive in the snow are the people who don’t know to slow down, take their time, and give themselves plenty of time to get where they’re going. That means leaving the house a half hour early and not being stupid.
2A for me. I’ve never owned snow tires (or chains, for that matter), but I drive in snow every winter, and have never had any problems (knock on wood).
I once heard a Washington State Patrol PSA on the radio about this. It pointed out, “Four-wheel drive may help you start moving and keep moving in snow, but it won’t help you stop. You have the same four-wheel brakes as everybody else.”
My dad, a retired WSP officer, told me that most of the snow accidents don’t happen in the mountain passes - they happen on the highway at either end of the passes. What happens is people drive carefully in the passes, because it’s obviously hazardous. Then they get through the pass, see the straight, wide-open highway, and all caution goes out the window. Cars and 4x4’s in the ditch and median all over the place.
I grew up driving in snow (Kansas and Missouri), and feel fairly confident in my abilities in midwestern snow.
The snow up here (Portland) turns immediately to ice and makes driving, even in the smallest accumulations, really dangerous. Ice is a different matter.
I’m a 2 because chains are required to carry in your car pretty much any time there is weather.
I’m a 2, complete with studded tires. My Idaho mountain town does an excellent job of plowing and such, but conditions can still get quite iffy.
A number of the local drivers change suddenly when the first snow hits – they go from courteous to asshole, simply because they don’t do anything different. This is my second winter here, so while I don’t have extensive winter driving experience I do have one solid winter’s worth. And I slow down and I allow more room and if you don’t like it, wait until you can pass me and then you can go off the road somewhere up ahead of me instead of skidding into my rear end.
I guess I’m a hybrid 1/2 leaning towards the 2 for the reasons **Max Torque **gives and Santo Rugger’s caveat.
I basically learned to drive on ice and snow, in a very hilly town, when I learned to drive at all. You need to learn to feel – not just guess – how fast and how close is safe. You need to have trained in the reflex to steer into a spin if you get yourself into one. You need to know what to do differently if you start to fishtail, and what a fishtail feels like so you don’t panic. You need to know what different road conditions look like – how to spot some lurking black ice, or packed-into-virtual-ice snow, etc. You need to know your own vehicle and tires intimately (no, not Biblically, you pervert) and know exactly what their limits are.
I’m a 2. I have snow and ice tires on my car and I stick to the road. Plus I’m in a standard and I gear down rather then use my brakes. I drive slower, but I’m not worried about slipping.
It does. Part of the problem is that before we get to Utah we cross Nevada where you’re allowed to drive 85 in some places and everyone does 95 because the roads are so straight and flat. By the time we get to Utah going 80 feels like 55 did before we started. The only 2 speeding tickets that I’ve gotten in my life were in Utah.
I’d be 2A. I stopped using snow tires decades ago – radials do just as well, and I’ve never been stuck.
The key is avoiding hitting the brakes. Let the engine slow you as much as possible. Thus, you start letting up on the gas as you get to a light.
You also need to know how to feather the brakes – light touch, release, light touch, release, etc. This keeps you from skidding.
Finally, you need to know what to do if you do skid. Luckily, front-wheel drive cars make it easy – take your foot off the brake and steer where you want to go. At one point, I had both front-wheel and rear wheel drive, so when I hit a skid, I’d have to remember which car I was in when reacting. Luckily, that doesn’t happen often.
Same goes for Austin. If you want to see total chaos though, come watch what happens here on the rare occasions when we get icy conditions. Then the issue isn’t your driving skills, it’s everyone else’s.
I’m a 4. I’ve never driven in snow, and wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so without riding with experienced snow drivers for a while and finding out how to do it properly. I do know how to put chains on.
heh. Yeah, pretty common for Texas. People here just don’t adjust their driving for poor conditions. There’s a light freeze, or some rain, and BAM! Ten accidents.
I grew up in New Mexico, which you might not think would have all that much opportunity for driving in the snow, but hoo boy, we had some winters. And the NM highway department rationed out the road salt like they wanted to take it with 'em when they died. So, I got some good experience there, since NM has a lot of psychopaths on the road.
The worst conditions I’ve ever driven in were Biblically bad. I could wax eloquent for several paragraphs about it, but the short version is that, thanks to my then-future wife’s stepdad, I drove the two-lane highway that was Wolf Creek Pass during a blizzard, in the dark. And that was among the last 40 or so of the 550 miles I drove that day. I have never been more tense or afraid for my life.
At least you recognize it. We see a lot of people who don’t seem to realize that there may be a difference, and that it’s slightly hillier here than in some places in the midwest, and that most drivers around them only see snow once or twice a year and have no clue what they’re doing and are slightly panicky about the whole thing.
I admit, I have no clue how to drive in snow. I try to stay the hell off the road.
I’ve lived in California almost my whole life. On the whole, we cannot drive in rain, much less snow. I don’t know how to drive in snow, but I would certainly slow down a lot. I can drive in rain, don’t like it much, but am careful.
It’s gotten dang cold here recently–this morning on my dawn walk it was 25, which freezes our little butts–and people are talking about the possibility of snow. If it happens, it will just about shut the town down. It’s probably kind of pathetic, since it always does snow up on the ridge, less than half an hour away. They seem to be able to cope.
To someone like me, a simple frost is impressive. My friend and I spent our walk gazing at houses where the people were still running their sprinklers, because of course the water had all run off and frozen on the sidewalks in a very slick layer of ice. And look! The water in the gutters is frozen! Ooh!
I used to live in Washington state. I’d have to drive my room mate to the base whenever it snowed, as he was from Florida. We counted over 40 vehicles abandoned on the side of the road once. About half were 4WD trucks; all had Washington plates.
On accelerating, the textbook method for driving a stick is to gear *up *in slippery conditions, to generate less torque and therefore less chance of powering into a skid. On slowing, braking is easier/faster to control than engine braking in dicey conditions; if you start to skid while braking, you just let off the brakes, but if you are engine braking it is a tricky bit of business.
Somewhere between 2 and 2A — I have chains, but don’t normally carry them unless I anticipate going outside the metro area. For most purposes I depend on fairly aggressive all-weather tires and the fact that I was taught to drive by a Montana native (who, as I’ve said elsewhere, wouldn’t let us take the driving test unless we measured up to his standards).
The best all-around maxim I’ve heard about driving in sub-prime conditions — snow, ice, gravel, mud, whatever — is to pretend that there’s a raw egg between your foot and the accelerator or brake. Obviously, that’s not going to be possible all the time, but it’s served me well so far.
Most fun I can recall is breaking a car out of a snowbank, from between two other parked cars, on an uphill grade. Took a lot of rocking (thank Og it was a stick), but I did it.
That’s a fantastic description. It gets at the distinction between speed of travel and speed of action: you might be able to go 30 instead of 20, but if you accelerate, decelerate, and steer at the same pace you would at 30 on dry pavement, you’ll be in trouble.