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OC Transpo will test new tire treads this winter to try to get buses better traction in deep snow, says the transit agency’s director of operations.
“Once you get over that five-centimetre snow accumulation on roads, that’s when most vehicles, especially our buses, tend to have traction issues,” Troy Charter said Monday, as OC Transpo was fighting its way back from a morning rush hour made difficult by snow that began Sunday afternoon and fell for most of a day.
That happens six or seven times a year and if a tweak to the designs of bus tires can cut the number by one or two, that could save Ottawans a lot of aggravation. But it can’t come at too great a cost. The tires can’t wear out too much faster, they can’t be much noisier, they can’t perform worse on clear roads. Because like OC Transpo’s current tires, they’d be used year-round.
Nobody makes a snow tire aimed at North American transit systems because there’s no market for them, Charter said.
Possibly no transit system in the country puts dedicated winter tires on its buses — certainly no major one. Not Ottawa or Gatineau. Not Toronto, not Vancouver, not Calgary, Edmonton or Halifax.
Montreal comes the closest, with winter preparations that include putting new all-season tires on the front of each bus and deeply grooved retreads at the back (Montreal’s transit agency does the retreading in its own shop). The provincial government in Quebec, which has a law requiring other drivers to put certified winter tires on their vehicles, exempted municipal buses.
American systems don’t use them, either. New York City’s buses used summer-type tires until a few years ago, but fitted them with chains when New York expected a blizzard. They switched to all-season tires in 2014 and still use chains in heavy snow.
“We are using similar tires that most other properties that experience winter conditions in North America are using as well,” Charter said. “It’s got a more aggressive tread than you would see in most all-season tires for other applications.”
Using the same tires year-round saves money and a lot of time. OC Transpo studied whether winter tires would be worth the trouble in 2007 and concluded firmly that they wouldn’t be, a determination that gets reviewed every couple of years, Charter said.
An articulated bus blocked afternoon commuters on Alta Vista Drive in February 2016, after it got stuck in the snow as the region dealt with a major snow storm.
Buses are different from cars. They’re much bigger and heavier and their tires are stouter. Their year-round tires have room for the wider grooves that are the traction-improving feature of consumer-grade winter tires. Plus tires made for snow would fail sometimes in the winter, just in different ways. They’d have worse traction on wet pavement.
Nevertheless, using only one type of tire on city buses leaves them vulnerable in conditions like Monday’s, when a bunch of snow falls early, and then continues to fall while OC Transpo’s 1,000 or so buses are all out.
“Anywhere where there’s a steep incline is obviously a challenging area,” Charter said. Anywhere a bus has to turn on a hill is especially bad. One stuck bus can screw up traffic for kilometres. Every year, OC Transpo and the city’s public-works department go over the transit map to make sure snow crews pay special attention to notorious spots like Trim Road in the east, the ups-and-downs of Bronson Avenue in the Glebe and Scott Street’s climb over the O-Train tracks at Bayview.
Besides different treads, there are other technologies worth looking at.
Vancouver is experimenting this year with “tire socks,” which its TransLink transit agency showed off in November. They’re actually more like hairnets: loose Kevlar wrappers that slip onto ordinary tires in a couple of minutes and can improve traction on slippery roads. (They wear out in a day, though, and at $250 a set, they aren’t cheap.) TransLink is trying them out on a handful of routes that go up and down steep slopes. B.C. approved them for trucks in 2015, though TransLink says it’s the first transit agency in North America to use them.
Charter’s interested in those, he said, at least enough to pay attention to what happens in Vancouver.
“They might have uses on routes that we know can be a challenge,” he said. “Or to get buses mobilized again without needing a tow truck.”
There’s no magical solution to a snow storm, though.
Monday’s morning commute was slow but steady, Charter said, and that’s about the best we can hope for. Buses did get stuck and a few were in fender-benders, but not many.
“For the most part it was uneventful and that’s what we like to see — we’re getting our customers to their destinations. A bit late but without incident,” Charter said.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“Once you get over that five-centimetre snow accumulation on roads, that’s when most vehicles, especially our buses, tend to have traction issues,” Troy Charter said Monday, as OC Transpo was fighting its way back from a morning rush hour made difficult by snow that began Sunday afternoon and fell for most of a day.
That happens six or seven times a year and if a tweak to the designs of bus tires can cut the number by one or two, that could save Ottawans a lot of aggravation. But it can’t come at too great a cost. The tires can’t wear out too much faster, they can’t be much noisier, they can’t perform worse on clear roads. Because like OC Transpo’s current tires, they’d be used year-round.
Nobody makes a snow tire aimed at North American transit systems because there’s no market for them, Charter said.
Possibly no transit system in the country puts dedicated winter tires on its buses — certainly no major one. Not Ottawa or Gatineau. Not Toronto, not Vancouver, not Calgary, Edmonton or Halifax.
Montreal comes the closest, with winter preparations that include putting new all-season tires on the front of each bus and deeply grooved retreads at the back (Montreal’s transit agency does the retreading in its own shop). The provincial government in Quebec, which has a law requiring other drivers to put certified winter tires on their vehicles, exempted municipal buses.
American systems don’t use them, either. New York City’s buses used summer-type tires until a few years ago, but fitted them with chains when New York expected a blizzard. They switched to all-season tires in 2014 and still use chains in heavy snow.
“We are using similar tires that most other properties that experience winter conditions in North America are using as well,” Charter said. “It’s got a more aggressive tread than you would see in most all-season tires for other applications.”
Using the same tires year-round saves money and a lot of time. OC Transpo studied whether winter tires would be worth the trouble in 2007 and concluded firmly that they wouldn’t be, a determination that gets reviewed every couple of years, Charter said.
An articulated bus blocked afternoon commuters on Alta Vista Drive in February 2016, after it got stuck in the snow as the region dealt with a major snow storm.
Buses are different from cars. They’re much bigger and heavier and their tires are stouter. Their year-round tires have room for the wider grooves that are the traction-improving feature of consumer-grade winter tires. Plus tires made for snow would fail sometimes in the winter, just in different ways. They’d have worse traction on wet pavement.
Nevertheless, using only one type of tire on city buses leaves them vulnerable in conditions like Monday’s, when a bunch of snow falls early, and then continues to fall while OC Transpo’s 1,000 or so buses are all out.
“Anywhere where there’s a steep incline is obviously a challenging area,” Charter said. Anywhere a bus has to turn on a hill is especially bad. One stuck bus can screw up traffic for kilometres. Every year, OC Transpo and the city’s public-works department go over the transit map to make sure snow crews pay special attention to notorious spots like Trim Road in the east, the ups-and-downs of Bronson Avenue in the Glebe and Scott Street’s climb over the O-Train tracks at Bayview.
Besides different treads, there are other technologies worth looking at.
Vancouver is experimenting this year with “tire socks,” which its TransLink transit agency showed off in November. They’re actually more like hairnets: loose Kevlar wrappers that slip onto ordinary tires in a couple of minutes and can improve traction on slippery roads. (They wear out in a day, though, and at $250 a set, they aren’t cheap.) TransLink is trying them out on a handful of routes that go up and down steep slopes. B.C. approved them for trucks in 2015, though TransLink says it’s the first transit agency in North America to use them.
Charter’s interested in those, he said, at least enough to pay attention to what happens in Vancouver.
“They might have uses on routes that we know can be a challenge,” he said. “Or to get buses mobilized again without needing a tow truck.”
There’s no magical solution to a snow storm, though.
Monday’s morning commute was slow but steady, Charter said, and that’s about the best we can hope for. Buses did get stuck and a few were in fender-benders, but not many.
“For the most part it was uneventful and that’s what we like to see — we’re getting our customers to their destinations. A bit late but without incident,” Charter said.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
