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Especially on high-traffic roads, traffic must flow safely all year round. In addition to melting snow by salting, methods by which road surface friction can be improved include gritting and in some cases roughening the snow or ice surface. However, neither of these methods provides adequate results on high-traffic roads, in addition to which they are considerably more expensive than salting.
Gritting sand does not stick to high-traffic roads, because of which it would need to be constantly re-applied. Furthermore, gritting is a much slower procedure than salting, in addition to which it is not suitable for preventing black ice, for example. There are of course many kinds of salts that differ from one another in regard to their environmental impact and corrosive effects, for example. The effectiveness of different salts is constantly being researched both in Finland and the rest of the world, but for now, table salt (sodium chloride) remains the most effective overall.
Winter causes road surfaces to become slippery, and in some situations roads can become so slippery for traffic that de-icing of roads becomes necessary. A good example would be a medium-traffic highway, which is used by approximately 4,000 vehicles per day. If we know that gritting sand will be swept away from the road surface after approximately 200 cars (the number is even lower for icy surfaces), salting is obviously a much more sensible option. Assuming that the slipperiness is persistent, if we were to replace the salt with gritting sand, the entire length of the road would have to be gritted at least 10 times per day. That would hardly be an ideal solution, and most drivers wouldn’t want to drive long distances amidst the constant spraying of sand either.
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