A guy where I work was having trouble getting his car up the last few feet of a steep (12% grade), icy driveway; even cable chains didn’t work. One person suggested using some sort of “traction mat” over the difficult bit of driveway. A third person replied:
I tried that once in Minnesota. Used a piece of carpet. Problem is, the carpet doesn’t grip the ice either. My wife was standing on the carpet when I hit the gas. All I remember is her feet suddenly flying straight up in the air in my side mirror as the carpet launched out from under her.
I guess I don’t quite understand why the wife would be standing on the carpet. I can only say that if my husband put some carpet down on some ice, got the car wheels on it, and told me to stand on the carpet until he hit the gas, I would walk away quickly. I think that poor woman must have been quite young. Always trust your instincts, ladies!
Back in my teens, I found myself in a parking lot right after a severve ice storm. It was kind of fun watching the speedometer going over 100 mph even though the car was standing still.
Well, I was standing still. At least until the tires melted down through the ice and suddenly got traction, launching the car toward the store front ten feet away.
I found out right away that it is even harder to stop on ice than to get moving. Fortunately a curb stopped me before I made my own drive through entrance to the store.
I was searching for some road traction device… possibly a grooved surface that can be lag bolted to the driveway.
Though not what I wanted… So far, I found this:
The man from Minnesota in the story above reminds me of my Uncle Glen and his wife, Esther. Aunt Esther, after bringing eight children into the world, was no longer a thin woman. My uncle Glen didn’t pay much attention to what he was doing most of the time. As Uncle Glen was dropping off his wife in front of the gracery store, he started driving off before Aunt Esther was free from the car, as her coat became caught in the car door when she closed it. Uncle Glen drug poor Aunt Ester halfway across the parking lot before the waving of the pedestrians in the lot alerted him to what was happening. Aunt Esther was OK except for a few bruises. They are both gone now, so I can tell this story without offending their 30+ (great)grandchildren.
Thinking back to the years when I was a high school math teacher, I wonder who knows what was the angle from the horizontal of the driveway mentioned above as being a 12 % grade?
A 100% grade is one that for every one hundred feet you travel horizontally you also climb one hundred feet.
Of course, I could be wrong about this. In my math classes, as I was explaining the solution of a problem at the chalkboard, I sometimes turned my back to the students and began to count on my fingers. I usually got a comment from one of the loudmouths, such as, “Mr Tipple, you are no math teacher!”
That’s correct. You have a right triangle where the inverse tangent of .12 is equal to the angle in question. Expressed in a different way, the tangent of 6.843 degrees is equal to 12 divided by 100.
We have some things like that for our shoes, and they can really make a huge difference when you have to walk on ice. Some types are better than others, but they can make the difference between walking and crawling.
That grass driveway idea is neat. I guess it might not work where you have to shovel snow because you would wreck the grass, but I’d have one if I lived someplace where I could. I’m surprised the grass will stand up to the car traffic, but I suppose there isn’t that much on a drive-way actually. Of course, I just thought of the weed problem—if it would be like taking care of a lawn, then I don’t know----anyway, it is definitely very attractive.
