S3E3 Winter Roads, Salt, and the Slippery Slope

Today, we will be covering a report by Jonathan Rubin, Shaleen Jain, Ali Shirazi, et al. titled, “Road Salt in Maine: An Assessment of Practices, Impacts and Safety”. In their report, they present the results from a research project by a team from the University of Maine, in cooperation with the Maine Department of Transportation that examines the use of road salt in Maine for winter travel safety. This report was published by Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center in April of 2022.

You can find the article here: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mcspc_transport/11/

Transcript

Eric Miller: A classic public policy dilemma. What do we do to limit the bad impacts of salting our winter roads while keeping the good impacts? Tune into today’s episode to find out. This is the Maine Policy Matters podcast from the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center at the University of Maine. I’m Eric Miller, research associate at the center.

On each episode of Maine Policy Matters, we discuss public policy issues relevant to the state of Maine. Today we will be covering a report by Jonathan Rubin, Shalene Jain, Ali Shirazi, et al. titled, “Road Salt and Maine: An Assessment of Practices, Impacts, and Safety.” In their report, they present the results from a research project by a team from the University of Maine in cooperation with the Maine Department of Transportation that examines the use of road salt and Maine for winter travel safety.

This report was published by the Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center in April of 2022. Maine Policy Review is a peer reviewed academic journal published by the Policy Center. We’ll first briefly summarize the article and then speak with Jonathan Rubin and Brian Burne, a highway maintenance and engineer for the state of Maine.

Since 2010, there’s been an increase in accumulation of chlorides and freshwater and groundwater environments due to road salt in Maine, a trend consistent with the rest of the Northeastern United States. The state of Maine has 45,586 miles of public roadway, more miles per person than any other New England state.

This mileage is maintained by the MaineDOT, Maine Turnpike authority, as well as 483 municipalities in 16 counties, as well as three reservations. There are largely three best management practices regarding dealing with snow and ice on the roads. De-icing, pre-treating roads with brine, and pre-wetting the salt as it’s being spread.

The latter two of those options being considered anti-icing. Anti-icing and de-icing are different approaches to achieving the same goal. Anti-icing is different from de-icing largely due to the timing of the treatment. Anti-icing is a pre-treatment of the road before snow and ice start to stick. While de-icing involves removing ice already on the road by plowing snow and applying sand for temporary retraction and salt to melt the ice.

Anti-icing is a principle best management practice by MaineDOT and currently uses this approach on almost all state roads by treating them before ice and snow are able to bond to the. The Maine Turnpike Authority uses this on the entire turnpike. A survey shows that roughly 28% of Maine’s municipalities use anti- icing while the rest use the de-icing approach.

As mentioned earlier, anti-icing is a strategy that utilizes the application of pre-wetted salt early in a storm or by pre-treating the roads with a liquid brine. Pre-treating the roads with a liquid brine before a storm is another best management practice. As mentioned earlier, Maine Turnpike Authority and MaineDOT do not use this method.

12% of municipalities reported pre-treating their roads. However, it is not specified whether a liquid brine was the treatment of choice as opposed to pre-wet