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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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Snow–free roads seem like a beneficial thing for most modes of transport though.
Judging by that picture, pedestrians can get fucked though.
A picture can be deceiving.
That picture is of work being down on a part of Lyon street south of DeVos Performance Hall and Convention center, between Monroe Avenue and the Grand River.
(Don’t let the name fool you, DeVos Hall and DeVos Center are owned by the city. They’re just named after the billionaires who paid a chunk of change for its construction and subsequent renovations.)
The reconstruction there is to make the area much better for pedestrians. There used to be a some parking along that street, which I think when the work will be finished will be purely for valet service for the hotel on the south side of the street. That part of the street has been at least partially closed to cars for a while, even though most of the work is done. And I wouldn’t be shocked if those sidewalks are already heated.
As I said elsewhere, they’ve added a really nice seating area at the end of the street (you can’t really see it in this picture because it goes down toward the Grand River). This also better connects Monroe Avenue (where the picture is taken) to the walking bridge behind DeVos Hall that goes over the Grand River to the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library and Museum. Just across the street from that is the Grand Rapids Public Museum, with yet another pedestrian/cyclist only bridge back across the river.
Just behind the camera and about a block south is Rosa Parks Circle, another pedestrian focused area with safe access to several restaurants with outdoor seating and the Grand Rapids Art Museum.
In short, this is a very walkable part of town. It isn’t perfect, but it’s far from “pedestrians can get fucked.”
Also as I stated elsewhere, heating under the street like this can prevent the accumulation of snow which would be plowed onto sidewalks or bike lanes, and the accumulation of ice which would be treated with salt that would then run into the Grand River. It’s a very good solution for the specific problem faced by this city.
Hey it might not be a total retrofit.. the sidewalks could already have it.
In the winter people walk in the plowed roads in Michigan. But mostly people ride snowmobiles everywhere when there's a lot of snow on the ground. You don't want to be walking on a snowmobile track.
This is the most inefficient way to remove snow. There are other options.
This is an excellent way to remove snow and ice in cramped areas without destroying to local water table with salt.
Is it though? I'd be curious to hear a more efficient method... Certainly, mobilizing a fleet of snow plows and salt trucks isn't more efficient in any sense of the word.
Yeah, it actually is more efficient to plow. It's grossly inefficient to melt ice into water.
See this xckd what if: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYf9-xfm6t8
It starts by using a flamethrower (because the series is supposed to be about silly questions taken seriously), but it eventually converts everything in terms of joules. That can be easily converted into the necessary electrical output. Which is a lot of electrical output. Just a sick amount of energy.
Plowing is easily better. But yes, salt is an issue all its own.
This is a pretty simplified and reductive take. How much electricity does it take to power a snowplow that can weigh as much as 30 tons with salt for all surface street miles? Is the freeze-thaw-freeze cycle plus weight damage to the road more efficient by cost/resource use? What about snowbanks as a hazard and visibility obstruction?
And that's putting aside all the ecological damage salt causes or that these systems can often recycle waste heat. Your video about a car traveling highway speeds melting multiple inches of snow isn't a gotcha for a completely different situation.
A Manhattan city block, on the short end of the rectangle, is 264 feet. A typical road lane is 12 ft across. Assume two road lanes and 4 inches of snow, getting 2100 cu ft of snow.
Using this snow weight calculator, fresh snow of that size will be 6,589.4 - 9,229.4 lbs. Let's take the midpoint of 8100 lbs. That's 3 million grams. And from here on, I can do the rest in metric.
Assuming it's at 0C already, it takes 334 Joules to melt 1 gram of snow. It will take 1.2GJ to melt the amount above.
There are electric snowplows being tested in Norway with 1000 kwh battery packs. That's 3.6 MJ. Quoting the article: "In light to moderate snowfall and temperatures as low as minus five degrees, the truck covered a total distance of 293 kilometers (km) at an average speed of 47 kilometers per hour (km/h). "
Yes, snow plows are more efficient. It's not even close. You can chop off orders of magnitude and it's still not even close.
I really, really need people in this thread to understand thermodynamics. Melting ice takes a fuckton of energy.
Maybe these can be useful to hybridize the system, where you plow normally and then melt the little remaining to avoid the use of salt. As a total replacement, no. That's a laughably bad idea.
The counter here is that oftentimes, snow melting systems like in the OP use waste heat that would otherwise get sent into the atmosphere or a lake. There is no power being generated specifically for melting snow. Using waste energy could be seen as a "free" way to melt the snow.
You're really caught up on energy efficiency, civil engineering is not just thermodynamics. Energy is becoming incredibly cheap, before the current administration derailed our energy sector, we were on track to hit $0.03/kWh for utility scale renewable power by 2030. For reference, that's about $10 to clear that city block.
And again, systems like this and the more famous one in Holland MI are generally run on waste heat (from a power plant, wastewater treatment plant or datacenter), so that math doesn't even apply. Looking only at energy cost leaves you tripping over dollars to save pennies.
The real costs are and always have been infrastructure. Yes, it's not possible to use this as a drop-in everywhere. It highly depends on the usage/wear of the road, space constraints, upfront cost of installation, maintenance, access to a heating solution, etc, etc... Even with this hydronic layout the main costs are the transmission lines, the cost to heat them is minor.
It's very weird to see so much resistance to this in an anti-car community, as if pedestrian and micromobility infrastructure doesn't need snow removal too.
Not an excuse for wastefulness. The numbers here are so great that a good sized city would need a nuclear reactor brought online just for this.
That's fine if it's available. It's usually heavy industry that's providing that. If you don't have a convenient heavy industry to provide that, then move on.
What of it? There's perfectly good plows for walking and biking paths, too.
Every single study shows it saving money in the long run. It's already in use and doesn't cause problems because professionals spend more thought and time on it than armchair internet engineers. You're tilting at windmills.
I mean maybe if our cities existed in Antarctica and experience 3"+ of snow per hour nearly every day year round and we insisted on keeping 40% of our city footprint as roads. How are cities currently running these systems? Somehow I haven't heard of any of them building extra nuclear reactors or going broke?
You realize that power use fluctuates and thermal energy storage is a dead simple, ancient technology? That the majority of snowfall happens overnight when power demand is at a minimum? You're just waving around napkin math with no concept of how anything actually works.
So we're just making things up now? CHP plants no longer exist? 17k water treatment plants and 4k datacenters using a combined 8-10% of all US power just vanished? Renewable power surpluses no longer need to be stored?
Isn't the goal in reducing car based infrastructure to cut the number of roads and make infrastructure more efficient? Instead of scaling heating costs to be smaller and more manageable you'd rather keep the fixed costs of a full vehicle fleet and the fixed damage of plowing and deicing? Your argument makes no sense at any scale.
If you want to talk about energy waste how about starting with the kWh you spend defying basic common sense over the internet.
Who's to say they don't plow first and then maintain it with the heat?
Who's to say they do?
You're the one assuming they're idiots, not me.
Assuming people are idiots has gotten me pretty far.
Takes one to know one
Have a good day
I think the xkcd was Moreso a Proof that melting large existing quantities of snow is incredibly difficult. If They're proactive with it and start running it before the snow pours then I'd assume its a lot easier to melt comparatively smaller quantities of snow over a large hot surface area.
I do agree that this requires people be smart and proactive and we haven't seen a lot of that lately. But hey, this is something they're being proactive about. Though it seems a little strange to assume they won't at least test and use the new expensive infrastructure they put in, no?
The power use is exactly the same. You are melting the same quantity of snow, but over a longer period of time.
In fact, it might be worse to pre-warm, because a lot of power will be wasted into the air.
Dog, you can't be lecturing people about their lack of understanding thermodynamics, and then mix up power and energy.
Muskegon has heated sidewalks and it works very well.
It probably comes down to where is the heat coming from. If this uses an existing heat source, it could be a very efficient way to do things.
But it can be tougher than you’d expect in cities. In my city they have turbojet melters because trucking all that piled snow out of the city was getting more expensive.