Cleveland Heights and University Heights Observatory

Whew!
I was down 271 and came back Richmond Road to Fairmount to Warrensville to Cedar at 1 pm today...so far so good in the big snow...and it was snowing pretty hard--all roads pretty clean, salted, and I hopped up to Cedar from Fairmount (instead of staying on Fairmount) because I figured Cedar would be clear the entire way home. Seems reasonable. UH salters were out in full force, a good sign--smooth sailing at 35 mph all the way through UH.

At exactly the University Heights/Cleveland Heights border at Taylor Road, Cedar Road became treacherous. It had been plowed, but no salt. A 3 car fender bender 500 feet ahead. People going 20 mph the whole way.

What gives? Can't the city salt at least our major roads and keep them clear during snow?

OK. That was cranky. Sorry about that.
Snow frustration.

Why apologize? It's a legitimate complaint. Every winter, you can spot the CH border on any street by where the snow removal becomes marginal to non-existent. Maybe if they weren't spending money subsidizing a rec-mall they promised would make a profit, they could afford more snow removal.

However, should salting be the answer? It's not good for the environment.

You are right about the salting, environment, issue. Less salt, less storm and ground water contamination. The City website talks about the EPA water contamination reduction program that the city has been implementing since 2003-- Sort of interesting, but not updated since 2004.

http://www.clevelandheights.com/citydep ... _storm.asp

I expect that money-saving has correlated with salt-saving for the past two winters; pretty sure that they're not salting side streets at all. We might be playing with fire, so to speak. A couple of weeks ago we awoke to some very frightening tire tracks that went through the snow, across our tree lawn into our front yard, narrowly missing a huge tree, through the hedges to the neighbors' yard then a hard right and back onto the road. I do not live on a side street. It was one of those nights where there was wet snow and an abrupt drop in temperature and I'm sure it was caused by the 2:30 am bar closing traffic. Later in the week there were similar tracks on both sides of the treelawn at EHB just east of Coventry. That incident left a few car parts behind. Luckily no houses, trees, people were injured, at least not that we know of.

Maybe it would be better just to raise the bar a little for getting a drivers' license.
You'd think that improved tires and suspension, ABS, etc. would reduce that sort of thing, but people have taken these improvements as an invitation to abandon awareness and skill and abdicate responsibility to the machine. The Toyota hysteria is a classic example.