genec

Exactly. There may not have even been rain or drizzle... it may have been an earlier fog, that deposited on the bridge and froze. There would have been no obvious evidence to anyone of the situation.

Helmet Head

Yes, Nova, on the bridge is another example. But black ice is notorious for forming under bridges as well.

I thought you were going to not reply to my posts?

slowandsteady

Ah, yes we have another one.

nova

I think we should feel sorry for the guy who hit and killed the cyclists as much as the cyclists who died in this case.

Theres always going to be that little voice in the back of his head about his defective tires. Even though they were not the cause he will feel they were part of it.

You know there was recently a topic about speed limiters in cities and even auto drive. I think something we should bring attention to is heated road ways. Maybe try to push for such a thing in areas where black ice is common or has caused a serious accident in the past.

How many here have seen solar powered construction signs? Each one of those units have more than enough power to melt ice in fact some even have heating elements on them to melt ice from the front of the signs. It would not be a multi billion dollar project to make use of similar set ups to heat black ice prone sections of roads. HH mentioned under bridges in the shadow (generally this isn't the most common place but he does make a valid point. On a road way (non bridge) shadows can contribute to black ice on road ways. Under bridges will not be a place where shadows do it.

But pictue this

A fairly curvatious (say any thing about that and ill smack you ) section of road. Somethign that is quite allot of fun to ride on a bike. I love finding some little back road with lots of curves and is slightly down hill or flat and just take em tight as i can fast as i can. Very attractive to cyclists. Now on one curved bit of this road are trees going over the entire road around the entire curve. The rest of the road is in bright sun light. And the road surface is 45f but in this tree covered section that road temp can be 32f or even lower.

This is the perfect conditions for black ice. Above freezing road temps every where up hill from it and the snow melts and rain don' frees. This melt water/rain water flows in to the shadow where the temp is freezing or below and instantly freezes. Its only low to mid 40s after all so it will freeze fast and hard as rock and crystal clear. A road warming system to bump this temp up to say 38 39 f with out any trouble at all and prevent crashes. Cost would be a few grand. I could build such a system in my freaking sleep.

Hey if it needs a new small tax to do it then by god tax me heres my freaking money.....

nova

Only your lame ones

Ive not seen to much black ice under bridges here. Mostly on them or in deeply shaded areas. Generally bridges are to short a distance to provide enough shade/shadow to form black ice. Course i suspect you have some serious bridges there where most here go over 4 to 6 lanes and are most often only 2 lanes (for the bridge).

fifty5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_ice

Black ice on highways

Black ice typically refers to a thin coating of glazed ice on a surface, often a roadway. While not truly black, it is transparent, allowing the usually-black asphalt/macadam roadway to be seen through it, hence the term. It also is unusually slick compared to other forms of ice on roadways.

It is usually deposited by extremely cold rain droplets, mist, or fog. The process of freezing is slowed down due to latent heat given off in sublimation, allowing the rain droplets to flow and merge together on the surface forming a film before freezing into clear ice. Nevertheless, because it contains relatively little entrapped air in the form of bubbles, black ice is transparent and thus very difficult to see (as compared to snow, frozen slush, rime ice, or other typical forms of ice on roadways). In addition, it often has a matte appearance rather than the expected gloss; and often is interleaved with wet pavement, which is identical in appearance. For this reason it is especially hazardous when driving or walking because it is both hard to see and extremely slick.

Black ice may form even when the ambient temperature is several degrees above the NTP freezing point of water. This occurs typically (and treacherously) when terrain contours and/or prevailing winds cause a local steep differential of atmospheric pressure and/or temperature, or when the atmosphere has warmed up after a prolonged cold spell that leaves the temperature of the ground and roadway well below the freezing point.

"Black ice" may also be cited as the cause of a car crash when, in fact, the real root cause may have been excessive speed, inattention, or some other fault on the part of the driver.

nm+

They do this is St Paul on the sidewalks. I think they use steam pipes.
I'm sort of interested in the breakdown of kill him v. accidents based on geography.
/N Im four stricker punishmint's fer gramar nasi's.

nova

Its hard to get decent stats.
You could not for example say that the fatality was do to the location or it would not have happened if.

Best you can hope for is stats on conditions at the time in a area. You can say that during conditions where there was black ice there was a 10% increase in auto etc accidents than when there wasn't.

It would be good enough i suppose

As for steam pipes its not steam just heated water. Some people with paved driveways have heated drive ways and they use hot water. I don't know why they don't use a wire element system. Only reason i can think of is any wire even stainless if heated oxidizes. Copper wires oxidize as well. Most home owners don't want to be taring up their drives every 5 to 10 years so water pipe systems are best. For a city how ever where roads are repaved/repaired every 5 to 10 years a wire system would work really well. Esp when your not trying to flat out melt the ice in to water. All you need do is melt the ice a tiny bit on the bottoms. It would then want to float and as cars ran over the ice it would break up and be forced off the pavement.

Caspar_s

So he was driving in winter conditions and didn't change his speed when approaching a group of cyclists? He doesn't have to lower his speed all the time, just when he goes past pedestrians etc. Of course, that doesn't mean he wouldn't have hit them - but it would have been a slower crash - possibly enough to let them react.

I blame their weather. Every year, the first snowstorm in Canada there are a ton of accidents. Then they remember how to drive in winter and they go down. England just doesn't get enough of a winter to let the people learn how to drive in bad conditions. I say lets divert the gulf stream and let them experience real winter... :-)

Anyway, stop blaming the cyclists - if you slip and crash on ice on a bike, you hurt yourself.

San Rensho 

If it was truly black ice, he could have even slowed down for them and still hit them. You have absolutely no control at all over the car on black ice.

When I hit black ice at 70mph i was going straight down the freeway and the only thing I felt was the car very, very slowly starting to spin, not turn. When i tried to steer, nothing, braking nothing, just drifting along at about the same speed. I realized it was black ice and put as little input into steeering, braking as possible. Luckily I was in the left hand lane and the natural crown of the road drifted me off the pavement and onto a gravel shoulder. Once I was in the gravel I had traction again on two wheels and I was able to catch it.

For the next few miles I saw many cars in the ditch on my side of the road facing the wrong way.

Wogster

Well, as someone who drives where black ice is possible a good six months of the year, there are a number of things a driver can do, to make black ice no more dangerous then dry summer pavement.

1) Know where it forms, typically under overpasses, bridges and other sheltered areas, where the sun can't get at it.

2) Know when it forms, typically when the temperature has been above freezing, and then quickly dropped more then 10 degrees below freezing.

3) Never do anything quickly, don't accelerate quickly, don't brake quickly, don't steer quickly, when you can not be sure of the roads surface conditions regarding traction.

4) Keep your car in good mechanical condition, 3 out of 4 tires not meeting safety regulations, indicates that the car was not in good mechanical condition, and probably had other safety issues as well.

5) Keep all windows and mirrors as clear as humanly possible.

This means that the driver probably wasn't trained to deal with black ice, which isn't the cyclists fault, isn't the roads fault, isn't the weathers fault, but is the drivers fault.

chephy

Maybe the motorists should've?..

mechBgon

Ummm, going to work and back is my most frequent reason. But any other reason is equally valid. Pic from a commute last winter, I shot this one-handed while riding:


If this looks dangerous, then you don't want to see what my dangerous rides look like I grew up in Alaska, by the way...

twahl

I'm not getting this. Why is it that so many are saying that the driver should have not been out in the weather, the driver should have known there was black ice, the driver should have done this or that. Most curious is the driver shouldn't have been out, but somehow the cyclists should have been? What's that all about? Yes, this was a tragic accident, but hell, people that know more about the particular case, know more about the conditions, and more importantly have to be responsible for their decisions have come to the conclusion that the driver wasn't at fault. Oh I know, that's that rail around here, want to get away with killing someone do it in a car. Yeah. I know. Sometimes you can't blame someone when something bad happens, or at the least you can't just blame the person that survived. This premise of this thread is a load of crap. We all heard about the accident when it happened. I'm glad to have heard the verdict, but the context in which it was presented was piss-poor. There is a lesson to be learned hear, but nobody is going to touch it because we're all so busy being outraged because a driver that was involved in a cyclist's death wasn't strung up by his testicles and beaten with a chainwhip until he was dead.

N_C

After you hit the 12 points and are banned can you ever drive again legally? Or are you banned for life?

bike2math

I can't speak for everyone, but my outrage arises because this is another example of a poorly driven vehicle killing someone. Rather than hold the driver accountable for his inability to keep the machine operating correctly, we are expected to believe that god or some higher power intended for the cyclists to die at that moment and no act of man could have prevented it. BS!! The car driven slow enough, the car driven carefully enough would not have hti them. At any speed if he still hit them, he wasn't going slow enough.

We have a mentality that let's people get off with being idiots, and being killers, and that is outrageous.

Wogster

It doesn't matter if he killed cyclists, other drivers, or a group of school children. It seems that once you are behind the wheel of an automobile, you are not responsible for what happens to that automobile. If you hit someone, or drive over someone, it was an accident, so your not at fault. This is so ingrained in society, especially in North America, that a serial killer who used a car, would probably get away with a victim a week for years, and nobody would even think about it.

donnamb 

Do they have black ice warnings on radio and TV traffic condition reports in the UK, the way they often do in the US?

slowandsteady

In the US, the answer is yes. Usually after some probationary period like a year or two you get the license back. You may then have some restrictions or may only need 3 points to get it revoked again. It differs from state to state.

ghettocruiser

That one's easy. The car slid into the cyclists, not the other way around.

If cars are following high-speed projectile motion off the road because motorists are going to fast to allow for icy conditions, it really doesnt matter whether people are cycling, walking on the sidewalk, or shoveling the snow out of their driveway, they are all at risk. If we are going to say that people should not be cycling, then maybe we should suggest that everyone without a roll-cage and airbags should stay in their house.

The fact that the victims here were cycling sounds almost irelevant to the fact that they were struck by a car sliding off the road at a high rate of speed.

As an aside, I occasionally cycle to work in snowy and icy conditions. Drivers here indeed tend to slide around a lot and occassionally off the road, but they do this at low speeds that present much less risk to bystanders. A car sliding off the road at 25kph is a completely different situation from a car sliding at 75kph.

This is a weird topic for August.

rajman

Writing as someone who rode through a Calgary december - riding on ice or snow is perfectly feasible and enjoyable. Precautions need to be taken and you do need to be relatively well equipped (though many of the cyclists on the streets in Toronto winters do ride beaters very effectively).

Just as motorists drive in bad weather conditions - if I need to get to work, I will need to ride.

Check out the winter cycling forum for advice on winter cycling.

BTW it should be understood by anyone riding in icy conditions that there are more risks to riding on ice and precautions must be taken to make it as safe as it can be. It would, however be nice if all road users could understand this as well and learn how to drive according to conditions.

nova

How fast is to fast for black ice. Being that this was in jan i think they said. Theres a really good chance that the roads were clear of normal packed snow ice with black ice in the shade. Roads were likely generally wet from snow and ice melt.
Considering black ice tends to look like a wet road a driver would not even think about slowing down in the shade because that wet road was really a patch of black ice. I live in ohio on a road where black ice is damn common. I could not even hope to count how many times cars have slid down the road in patch of black ice. Even going 5 or 10 mph they tend to slide the entire 100 or so feet on the black ice.

My dad slid in the stuff and had to drive through our yard from the neighbors because he could not get in our own driveway. He had heavy duty snow tires with studs and chains and still could not get grip on the stuff. You might as well be riding on oil covered glass with solid glass wheels. Studs no studs makes no difference.

There is no safe way to break or drive n the stuff you hit it as strait as you can and just go where the slide takes you thats if you relise its there in time.

remsav

Studs will work on ice especially for traction and control, and somewhat for stopping. I think most people drive carefully when they are in a ice rink conditions, but generally black ice is intermitten with drive pavement where you could easily lose control, I remember losing control of my car when I hit a black ice in a groove on the road, next thing I know, I'm facing on coming traffic on a 4 way road, luckily I plowed into the snowbank and all the traffic on that side had stopped for red light. They even pushed my car out before the police showed up, not sure if the car had anything to do with it, it had a tendency to pull or wobble sometimes and was back heavy Dodge charger, more then likely I over corrected the pull and did a 180.

ghettocruiser

I think some of the arguments here that are being made for "why were people riding when the roads were icy" are the same arguments some motorists make for "why were people risking riding on the road" the rest of the year. Black ice may be tricky to see and difficult to navigate. I've ridden on glare, clear road ice with studs and been just fine. I've also hit similar ice with rubber-only tires and crashed.

The point is that the crash was my fault, regardless of how hard the ice was to see. If my bike had slide into a bystander on the sidewalk, I wouldnt ask them "why they were risking walking next to an icy road" if they were injured. If they slipped on the ice and fell in front of my bike, then it's a valid question.

Juha

Exactly. Same with cars, studs do help. What also helps is some experience and education to drive in winter conditions. But even with all that help:

Same here.

--J