Yeah...
Lots of stories. Many moons ago, I wound up going around a corner kind of sideways...recovered just fine but a cop noticed...who proceeded to crash his squad car trying to pull me over and needed help to get it unstuck. I learned winter driving on Lake Eerie, so....he didn't even give me a warning, probably because he was so embarrassed. I've also lost count of the times I've run a red light (from already having stopped) because someone came up behind me way too fast and were instantly sliding sideways at me because they think ice means "brake harder" instead of "brake earlier".
It gets really scary when you see an 18-wheeler do it.
That small snowstorm turned huge traffic jam....I wound up riding my cyclocross bike around midtown Atlanta's totally empty streets for a few hours looking for a grocery store or bodga that was actually open...never did find one, and I didn't see a single car with a person in it the whole time. It was wild. A metro area of ~5 million people turned into a ghost town.
Well...they're convinced sand does something, so they don't even really use salt. In their half-defense, there aren't any car washes with undercarriage sprayers, so if they did that...all the cars would rust out. Also, they basically wait until there's a crash and then dump sand on top of that piece of ice and move onto the next crash....because they don't have enough trucks to do anything preventative.
Which is really a cost/benefit thing for them. We've gotten ice about 6-7 times that I can remember in the last 25 years or so. None of them were as bad as the first wet cold snap every year in Minnesota except for the traffic they caused, and the traffic was really only horrible that one time. I'd imagine that they could use the trucks for something else...but if they didn't maintain them properly, they'd just sit in storage for years at a time and not work the next time they needed them anyway.
