My girlfriend just chaged the tires on her car and it made me start thinking, where does all the rubber go that wears off of your tires? There should be piles of the stuff along the highways.
Some of it blows off the roads. Some gets washed off. Some gets vaporized.
Vaporized? Yeah, I know, blown off and washed off but given the amount of cars on the road (x4 tires, at least, each) you would expect the parkways to be inches deep in rubber.
Ever heard the phrase “burning rubber”? It’s not always just idiomatic. Tires can get very hot, especially during intense accelerating/decelerating. Also, I would imagine that much of the rubber just gets swept into the atmosphere.
If you’ve ever seen an older road, the pavement is faded to a dull gray. But there are two parallel lines of black in each lane about 6 feet apart, where everyone’s tires go. They are kept black by thousands of tires depositing their worn-off rubber on them.
A very important safety consideration drivers should always bear in mind is this: when it rains after a period of dry weather paved roads become slicker than snot on a doorknob.
You may be able to drive normally without realizing that, if you slammed on the brakes or spun the wheel too much, you’d slide like you were on an oil slick. It’s a very dangerous condition. In my experience heavy traffic will, after an hour or so, mix things up enough so that your tires have a much better and safer purchase on the road, but… for a while after it rains on dry pavement you are driving on a very dangerous surface. What makes this surface? A mix of leaking fluids from cars and fuel combustion by-products mixed with, and thickened by, tire material. Perhaps a chemist or traffic safety expert will chime in here with a more scientific elaboration on this.
I once lived in an old drafty house that was situated smack up against the sidewalk that fronted a four-lane busy city street that was also a truck route.
I must note that of all the places I’ve lived, this was by far the dustiest.
Being that I don’t dust often (if ever), I’ve noted a lot of different types of dusts. And this dust was thick and grey, unlike any other dust I’ve seen.
So it seems to me that rubber dust is just that: dust. You can’t see it unless it accumulates somewhere.
Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the “Car Talk” guys who are almost Cecil-like in the realm of automotive knowledge, have addressed the issue in this column.