Winter Cycling - My life flashed before my eyes...

I went out riding during last week's storm on a mtb with 26" knobbies, freshly plowed street with about 2-3 inches of compacted slush on it.

I'm doing about 15 mph down the street when I get into a set of tire tracks from a car that pulled out of the drive way, my rear wheel starts skidding and I'm going sideways down the street at like 15 mph with a snow plow behind me, every time I tried to pedal faster, the wheel would just skid, if I tried to gain traction, it would just slow me down so I just hung on for my life and skidded sideways into this 6 ft snow bank at the end of the street on the side, I swear my life was flashing before my eyes the whole time..

Anyway, question, studded tires work on ice but what about the kind of compacted snow on city streets?

Zoiks shaggy. A couple things might help, sure studded tires could help with traction, they've helped me. But also lowering your air pressure to like 40 or 50 lbs would work, gives you a broader footprint and better able to purchase the snow pack. The other is be careful around those ruts that cars leave. Realize you are on a bike and those big things with plows also carry a truck load of sand so their stopping capabilities suck worse than your's. So pull over and let them by, so you are too anxious, it's when you're anxious and tense that you tend to freeze up and that's the worse thing you can do on ice, or snow pack. Like MTBing, it's loosey goosey, or is it lefty loosey, righty tighty...

Yeah you're right but at the time I didn't know the plow was behind me, I mean it's a huge blizzard at 10 in the evening, I didn't think anyone would be out on the streets till I went sideways and caught a light behind me lol.

From looking at studded tires, it looks like the entire tire would just get gummed up from softly packed snow.

Actually it really doesn't, I just rode home through some real crap snow, soft packed that cars hadn't packed yet but it wasn't cleared yet and there wasn't enough ice in it, and the Nokians did the trick, I was all over, trying to find a good tire rut, but once I got going it was pretty nice riding.

I went down once in a snow storm in the bike lane, with traffic bearing down on me. You do see your life before your eyes. I tried riding on side walks after that, but that just sucked royally. So I'm in the streets with studded tires, and on the bike paths with studded tires, and I'll be here for a while.