Snow and Ice
 

I just looked out on our lane and there are quite a few couples out walking/sliding in the bright sunshine and snow. It's good to see and it's also good to see the few drivers who are about keeping to a precautionary 5 to 10mph, given the road surface is sheet ice. Of course there's always an exception and the driver of a small black BMW hatchback who drove past at about 30mph with just a left hand on the steering wheel and the other hand holding a phone to his ear, is one of today's.

Travelling back from Manchester yesterday morning, ( in my support bubble role to a disabled lady with terminal cancer), I was pretty happy I had got over the Pennines on a dry day with occasional dazzling sunshine without any weather problems.
That all changed at Dishforth on the A1, and all along the A168, and A19 when the heavy snowfall ensued, quickly reducing the northbound to a single carriageway being used by drivers in a cautious and sensible manner.
Then along the now snowed over outside lane it came, one of those huge BMW things ploughing it's way along passing all the traffic and showering huge amounts of snow and slush over everyone's cars briefly making vision impossible.
This happened a couple of more times with more of those big ugly brutes( the cars), ploughing along.
Hmmm perhaps the drivers matched my description of the cars.
Road hogs in every sense.

Its scary how many people have no clue how to drive in poor road conditions.

May I shorten your post to the following? "Its scary how many people have no clue how to drive"

macafee2

‘It’s fine - it’s a 4wd’

🤬

Yeah, a 4wd means you can drive like an idiot all year round! Going down to the Lakes a few years ago a Range Rover went screaming down the outside lane of the M6, must have been doing 100+, I was doing 70 and it left me for dead. Delighted to see it a few miles further on sitting on the hard shoulder with a traffic car behind it :D

My father was a class 1 police driver on the traffic cars, always followed what he was taught, treat everybody else on the road as an idiot!

4WD is OK and will keep you going for longer in slippery conditions but I recall sitting in a stationary queue in a blizzard in Harrogate when an impatient * in a Range Rover decided to drive past the traffic, something we all could've done because it was downhill. They went past me but only got another 2 or 3 vehicles down when they were confronted by a central reservation. They braked, locked up and slid gracefully into the railings and bollard.
4WD may keep you going but braking is another whole thing.

Travelled the M62 route over the Pennines many times in all seasons and weather. Always thought of Brady and Hindley at a certain point in the journey together with the girly boys who slaughtered the real men and a family on a bus on the M62 in 1974. The oldest passenger on the bus being 28 and the youngest child only 2. A whole family of 4 slaughtered by girly boys, both parents only 23 and their children of only 5 and 2 years old. Quaint words of dismissal like "The Troubles" might cut it with the self-serving and the yanks but not with the decent and the many. Captain Bob Nairac from Sunderland gave a bl00dy nose with his bare fists to a gang of the girly boys who set about him before they overwhelmed him. So embarrassed are they for what he exposed them as that to this day they won't cough up to what they did with him. Strange, eh, that, given the so-called agreements of co-operation of the so-called peace accord. :shrug:

:smilie_re: And not forgetting Stott Hall Farm which is encompassed by the M62 near to its summit. Always a bit of an enigma but courtesy of the internet no longer so. :)

It doesn't matter what you are driving, on ice the contact patch of the tyres is the same for all of us, regardless of what we are driving.

Sure is. But strange as it may seem, wider tyres are not the answer according to some experts. Maybe the aspect of a tyre is also relevant (certainly tread type and depth as also will studs). There might be something in this as to-days FWD wide tyre vehicles perform little better than 60's/70's RWD vehicles in the white stuff - think 30 bhp Beetles.

Kev