Editor:
What’s with the practice of spreading sand/salt down the middle of the road, three feet wide right on the center line?
It is causing a hazardous driving conditions and possible head on collisions.
It is a phenomenon where everybody drives with their driver’s side tires on the sand for traction down the center line.
After a snowfall, as the snow packs in on the road surface, what should be two lanes is set as one and a half.
So if you are like me and don’t like driving down the center of the road you end up with your passenger side tires in the slightly deeper unpacked snow that has now become the shoulder and is actually the better part of the right side of the lane.
As head on traffic comes toward you with a closing speed of 180 to 200 km per hour, some people do not move over, causing the collision hazard.
What happened to the sand trucks that spread the sand out the back, so that the sand is centered in the lane.
They may give you some round about reasons like the sand blows off the road quicker when spread closer to the shoulder, or the trucks that spread sand from the back might spray following cars with sand but the real reason is money.
By spreading the sand down the center line it’s a savings of 50 per cent.
Not just half as much sand, but half as many trips and loads which means half as much fuel and half as many trucks and drivers needed.
We talk about the price of safety on our winter roads when people are dying on a regular basis, maybe the minimum standards are not good enough.
I understand they need to keep the drivers working but when I see them out scraping the shoulders when it hasn’t snowed in over a week and there really is nothing to scrape off, I think what a waste of money that could be utilized somewhere else like sand for both lanes.
Aaron Bergeron
