Here’s a hugely entertaining video, in the best “glad that wasn’t me” sense, of cars sliding down an ice-covered street yesterday in Portland’s Goose Hollow neighborhood. (Thanks to Blue Oregon for the link from Seattle’s KING-5).
Videos like this should put to rest the fiction that Oregonians are snow weenies. True, on the west side of the Cascades we usually get snowfalls that would be greeted with a yawn in Chicago, Minneapolis, or Denver.
But there’s a big difference in slipperiness between cold dry snow and snow that falls around the freezing mark—especially when freezing rain precedes the white stuff. Plus, we’ve got hills here.
Combine ice with a sloping street, add a car, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, no matter how good a driver you are. (Interestingly, though, the last car shown in the video navigates a turn just fine. It looks like a high-end BMW to me. Sophisticated traction control and snow tires makes a big difference on ice.)
You mus tbe joking. The biggest foul in that entire video, and evidence that too many Portland drivers are insufficiently self-aware to know when they need to stay out of their cars, is the idiot who pinballs the most -- not because of momentum, but because he won't take his frickin' foot off the gas pedal.
Posted by: b!X | January 17, 2007 at 02:03 PM
b!X, I assume you're referring to the car that goes straight down the street, seemingly in control, before it crashes into other cars.
I don't know--you might be right, that he's got his foot on the gas.
But the way I see it, he also could simply be successfully keeping the car pointed down the hill, freewheeling on the ice, until a curve, bump, or random brownian motion throws him into the parked cars.
I do agree that it was foolish to even attempt the hill. In defense of the drivers though, it probably looked snow-covered rather than ice-covered.
Our driveway does that a lot: get a coating of ice or freezing rain, then snow on top. You can walk fine on the snow. But too much pressure sinks you down onto the ice, where there's hardly any traction at all.
Posted by: Brian | January 17, 2007 at 05:56 PM
Brian, I believe b!X is referring to the **first** car in the video, where you can hear the driver floor it with the wheels just spinning on the ice.
Posted by: Alan | January 19, 2007 at 10:06 PM