Road salt may hurt vital link in freshwater food chain, study says
Road salt may hurt vital link in freshwater food chain, study says
The team tracked individual plankton them from birth to death and exposed them to various concentrations of sodium chloride (rock salt) and calcium chloride.
Yep. When I say fuck cars, I mean fuck car infrastructure too.
this shit is unsustainable, and if we want a future, we cannot wait for it to die on its own.
which it eventually will, because that's what "unsustainable" means, but holy shit. the amount of resources and ecological damage that goes into maintaining it, the amount of LABOR than goes into maintaining it, fuck.
Proper snow clearance and de-icing is a vital part of wintertime infrastructure maintenance in colder climates. Icy roads are dangerous to everyone, but perhaps especially pedestrians and cyclists.
On an average year, more people are injured due to slipping on ice (~36000) than in traffic (~18000) in Sweden (where I live).
Obviously it'd be better to have more enviromentally friendly solutions, but this really isn't a car issue. In some areas here they've installed heating under the pavement to de-ice, which avoids salting and is much nicer for pedestrians, though is horribly expensive by comparison.
Where I live they just de-ice the road for cars, pedestrians and cyclists can dream about it, and I always wondered why, our cars have 4 wheels, it's not like I'll fall, but my body or my bike is just on two point (one when I'm walking), much more chance to slip
In towns/cities this sort of stuff is handled by the municipality here. Maybe you could send in a suggestion to your local council?
Also, in places where winter tires (not all season crap) aren't the norm, or studded ones are outlawed (pure idiocy IMO) road vehicles are just as susceptible and the danger of not being able to stop. When considering that road vehicles include say a... 50ton cargo truck that becomes a high priority.
We actually had some issues this last winter - truckers from continental Europe (who don't have proper tires) getting stuck and blocking one of our national highways (more than once) in the middle of snow-storms. In one case more than a thousand people were stuck in the ensuing chaos.
Not sure how this isn’t a car issue since:
Roads cover much larger areas,
Consume area that could otherwise be used for source control of stormwater, and
In my experience, are much more regularly and heavily salted.
Many Nordic countries use gravel as a salt alternative. Pretty sure there are salt bans for private areas.
Trams, railways.
Example from Helsinki, little maintenance needed (like heated switches).
No salt bans in my area at least, but it's only effective above a certain temperature (around -15°C iirc). On sidewalks/bike roads it's usually gravel+salt and on roads only salt. An unfortunate side-effect of gravel is that it (a) needs to be swept up in the spring which adds cost and (b) poses a hazard to cyclists once the snow is gone.
It is all about reduction. Wider lanes need more salt coverage than smaller ones, same for parking lot sizes. More importantly, we could also be treating the salty run off water. Many roads just drain straight into the creeks or waterways, using sedimentation and retention ponds could reduce salinity before entering the environment.
This is still a car issue, though. From a US perspective which is extremely car-dependent, all of the following get deiced and either exist only because of car-centric infrastructure or would be present to a much lesser degree without it:
- Driveways are often deiced by individuals. You'll likely also deice the concrete path to your door, but removing the driveway from the equation nearly always dramatically lessens how much needs deicing.
- There are enormous, sprawling parking lots that get deiced. These parking lots would not exist in such an insanely sprawling form if not for car-centrism.
- Highways, exit ramps, and road bridges need deicing.
- Car-centrism leads to much wider lanes than streets and roads actually need, creating vastly more surface area to deice.
- Car-centrism leads to ridiculous sprawling urban design which means untold kilometers of road that wouldn't exist otherwise get deiced.
Cutting down on car-centrism in the US and Canada would create an enormous reduction in how much deicer needs to be used here.
this feels like you think car roads just appear magically from nowhere, and are an elemental feature of the world, not a ridiculously bloated maintenance expenditure of literally every municipality in the country.
Being genuinely curious - how do the folks who advocate for the elimination of all personal cars (as it seems by the conversation) see that working in modern society?
The impression, as I perceive, is that the hardcore "fuck cars" devotees would "Thanos snap" and disappear the entirety of the car... society(?) Infrastructure, petrol, private transport ownership, roads... And I'd wager there's a bit of crossover with the "fuck planes" and "ships" as well. I'm not saying that all of these don't bring and have major problems that require big, expensive solutions/changes if we want to remain living. I'm asking: how would you propose dealing with global society that is accustomed to going 75 mph when they wake up one morning and they're now going 2.5 mph?
Salting the earth is bad for the environment? Well I never.
Im sure its fine, Carthage will be back on its feet any day now.
In case anyone thinks sand is automatically a better option, it's not. Fine particles settle in the benthic layer of streams and ponds, smothering everything that needs exposed gravel beds for their life cycle. This impacts invertebrates directly (harming everything that eats them) and disrupts many fishes egg-laying.