Maybe.
But those types of vehicle enthusiasts also understand what 4x4 is designed to do, in my experience.
I’m more worried about the person that owns a vehicle out of sheer necessity, gets an AWD because “better traction”, and heads out on a bad snow day with a bigger confidence in the snow. Previously this person would have stayed at home or gotten stuck on their street trying to get through the drift from the snow plow. Now their giant AWD nimbly moves the vehicle to normal driving speeds and is now a newtonian problem.
I grew up in the upper Midwest and never saw people use chains. It’s so flat that it doesn’t make sense. Where I see chains used to good purpose is on snowy mountain roads where the snow is snotty and prevent many cars with all-season tires from making it up the slope, or worse, will make a stopped vehicle slide laterally right off the road.
I used studded tires in winter for a good long while and they not only help for snow but also ice, and help with stopping as much as steering. Now I just use dedicated modern snow tires like Nokians that don’t do the kind or road damage as studded tires but are nearly as good on snow and even ice. In combination with a good AWD system, you really can have pretty decent traction on almost any surface.
ETA: and while looking into it, I found that Nokian has introduced a retractable studded tire. Amazing stuff!
“Steer into the skid” only applies with rear-wheel drive. If the drive wheels are going right, turn the wheel to the right works. If you apply the same rule with front-wheel drive, you compound the problem.
This is so important, and I give props to the countries that include hands-on skid recovery as a mandatory part of their drivers ed courses. I got to do mine on the pad at Laguna Seca as part of a race training day at Skip Barber, but I really needed that for it to “click” and for me to realize what to do when you skid out - you really have to experience it to understand it.
Completely unrelated to the above, why the hell are US overpasses so insanely HIGH?
I went through that interchange hundreds of times when I lived in Milwaukee. A few near misses when I was 19 (spinning out and ending up facing traffic, sliding into a ditch) gave me a respect for winter road conditions that I hope my now 19yo son learns sooner rather than later!
See, what most people are missing is this is another go at the Selective Attention Test. But I wasn’t fooled. This time, I did see the man in the gorilla suit:
Unfortunately, no video, and the driver did not survive, but back in 2009, San Francisco Bay Bridge was being updated and in order to reroute traffic, they had installed an S-curve, with speed warnings “slow to 35 MPH”. The driver of the big rig at 3:30AM in 2009 apparently failed to slow and the 18-wheel flipped over the railing, fell about 200 ft, which killed the driver and left the entire truck and its content a total mess on Yerba Buena Island.
In some interchanges it is necessary for bridges to cross over other bridges. And there is at least one place in Detroit that has three bridges crossing over each other (yes, vertigo is a problem.)
Factors leading to this include:
Interstate freeways are high speed (engineered for 70MPH/113kph minimum), limited access roads that do not have intersections needing traffic controls; instead they use a system of on- and off-ramps to allow traffic to enter the freeways at the posted speeds.
Ramps have minimum curve requirements to keep traffic from slowing too much as they round them, causing jams.
Not all interchanges meet at 90 degree angles, so some curved ramps become even longer, taking up more room.
Sometimes there isn’t enough available land surrounding an interchange to permit building all the needed curvy ramps directly on the ground. Instead, they use curved flyover bridges for the ramps, reusing the real estate above the freeways below.
Bridges are cheaper solutions than tunnels.
Interstate freeways were originally built to rapidly move troops across the country without obstruction. These include carrying very large vehicles and payloads. The minimum standard height is 16 ft (4.9 meters), but even that can be too low in snowy climes, where snowplows are affixed to dump trucks that drive around with raised boxes to dump sand and salt on the roads.
Bridges are often arched for strength and increased ground clearance over the main arteries.
Including the thickness of the bridge itself, ramp bridge decks are usually about 25-35 feet above the ground. So it’s not uncommon for a bridge that crosses another bridge to be 70 feet up.
There are a few more interchanges that have four levels in the greater LA area and I like to annoy my spouse by shouting “four level” whenever we drive under, over, on any one of them.
Same here! I hate that interchange. The exit from I-94E to I-45N always backed up - I was rear-ended twice on that ramp in the four years I lived there.
I have… opinions about Wisconsin drivers based on my time there.
The really kewl multi-level in the LA area is the 110/105 stack, which incorporates separate roadways for each major direction, an E/W Metro light rail (and its station!), an E/W HOV lane, a N/S Busway/HOV/HOT lane (including Busway station!), dual-lane flyover ramps connecting all the HOV lanes, bridges for four surrounding surface streets that interpenetrate the sprawling stack, and, at the very bottom, a freight-rail line crosses diagonally under the whole stack.
And all of this built on land where the local water table is so high it must be continuously pumped so the foundations don’t float away.
I don’t know where ‘here’ is for you, but in Canada where winters are a thing, the only province that legally requires everyone use snow tires is Quebec. Some provinces have requirements for snow tires for school busses, or snow tires in mountainous areas, but overall snow tires are only a recommendation in the rest of Canada. Sometimes you can get an auto insurance discount for having winter tires.
Winter tires give something like a 3% advantage in accident avoidance. (Whether that translates to a 3% improvement in traction is a different question.)
What this means is that if the cost of a set of winter tires is less than 1/33 of the average cost of an accident (including medical expenses, etc.,) they’re worth it. A set can range from $200 - $800+, so if an average accident averages more than roughly $6000-$25000, they’re worth it.
A quick Google shows a study quoted by a lot of lawyers on their web pages suggests the average cost of an auto accident is $8900.
Are they worth it? It’s really a personal decision whether or not to reduce your risk. Financially, there’s no compelling argument strongly in favor of winter tires.
