Since I was lucky enough to get Christmas off from work, I made sure to be in Uppsala with my near and dear ones to get properly fed for the New Year. Christmas means winter in my part of the world and winter means time for winter tyres again. For the second year, it also means time for hometown hassle and great frustration management challenges behind the wheels.
Quick background for you non-Swedes; In Sweden we’re supposed to have snow and ice during winter. Snow and ice make the roads slippery. With normal summer tyres that means very slippery and a lot of cars where they shouldn’t be, such as in the ditch or with metal-to-metal contact with other cars or metal-to-wood contact with trees. With winter tyres, it’s less slippery and thus fewer accidents. To make it even less slippery you use studded winter tyres and you’ll get even less cars driving into each other or skidding off the road.
So far, so good and logic is still intact in the Nordic countries. However, if you in some cities don’t have the roads covered with snow and ice all the time, the studs will of course wear the asphalt a little bit more. More costly than necessary, of course, but to me an okay price to pay for safer roads once the ice is there. Because of this extra wear of asphalt on warm winter days, they’ve banned driving with studded winter tyres on most of the streets in the city centre in my hometown since last year. Mainly, to save the people who have chosen to live as central as you possibly can from the dangerous asphalt dust the studs presumably cause.
So, now, instead of producing the dangerous asphalt dust when driving straight through the city centre for about 15 min, we’re producing the same kind of asphalt dust for 45 min driving serpentine criss-cross routes to get from A to B and onwards to C legally. Instead of exposing the people living along the city centre routing for the unhealthy dust, we’re exposing three times as many people for it. Only difference being that they live slightly outside the city centre and not in the middle of it all. Possibly with the hope for slightly fresher air than the ones enjoying the closeness to the downstairs restaurant and nightclubs. But that was before we had to spend half the morning to plan the routes across town, with it’s banned and one way streets, to make sure it didn’t take us an additional 38 min to get to back to B after stopping by at C, in case we forgot something there.
Guess there are some positive things with it though. We got a new road sign, which looks kind of funny. It would fit perfectly in the road sign collection you used to get for your play mat as a kid. The one with roads and blocks painted on it and a nice space for your plastic petrol station. And if you haven’t really got around to use your new GPS, this is the time and location for it. Get the newest updates with the non-studded-tyres streets and see if you can beat 20 min per straight-line kilometre you need to move yourself.
Point is; I really can’t get the logic of this exercise. The choice is, either more asphalt dust and exhausts produced in total, or more accidents since people will skip the studs. Loose-loose situation or I must be blonder than I think.
By the way, almost forgot - Happy New Year! Didn’t really mean to start in such a grumpy way, but hey, can only get more cheerful as 2012 trickle along now. All the best and enjoy your New Years resolutions for as long as they last.
