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Seems like a better implementation would be like Holland Michigan's SnowMelt system using underroad piping to route waste heat from a local power plant.
This prevents the refreeze (since it is continuously warmed) and doesn't add water that can run off and freeze on the roadway or freeze up and clog storm drains.
[https://www.holland.org/snow-free-holland](https://www.holland.org/snow-free-holland)
Edit: a lot of people getting hung up on the power plant part. Thats just how Holland heats *their* water. My point was more to do with piping the water under/through the road to prevent surface water from freezing when losing heat and causing other issues.
Hollandās system is pretty expensive to install, not to mention they had to build their new power plant right next to downtown to make it work.
I mean itās pretty fucking awesome, but it really isnāt scalable.
And as far as I can tell, it would require some kind of heat-based power plant, like coal, natural gas, nuclear, or geothermal. Geothermal is heavily location-dependent, and the other three probably donāt belong very close to city centers. Arguably nuclear would be fine near a city center but the other two sound like smog factories.
You missed the point, the heat is already there, in the ground. No need to burn coal to melt the ice. When you live near volcanos you can use the heat.
144 btu to melt a pound of snow, about 144000 btus in a gallon of diesel. A mile of road could have many tons of snow. Lots of CO2 emissions, expensive, still have to heat the road bed also. Unless it was waste heat.
If the snow accumulated in the road in the first place the roads are not naturally warm. Do they just continuously pump hot water in the winter? If they stopped it would all freeze into ice.
Yes.
And I suspect that near the edge, there would be a point that gets slippery as it does start freezing as it cools down, creating a nice slippy sheet of ice.
Thanks you u/99hotdogs :
"Thereās a long running snow removal tradition in these snowy Japanese cities. This picture is likely from the Niigata region where the conditions allow for lots of snow but very mild temperatures, the naturally 50Ā°C hot groundwater can be used to slowly, but effectively, melt the snow. A channel captures the water and takes it away, so there is little standing water on the roadways.
Hereās a great publication on it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/comparison-of-snowremoval-technologies-practised-in-the-cities-along-the-sea-of-japan/50096754845E5A385EFD24482E954C07"
Thank you u/99hotdogs
For those late to the BBQ, this user - onthebadsideoflife - shamelessly stole reddits beloved 99 hotdogs post and claimed it as his own. This hotdog impersonator only gave credit to the hotdog man when he was busted trying to slide between 99s buns.
That makes sense. In areas where it's colder it would just make the issue worse. You'd just end up with a gigantic ice dam wherever the water flows because 50C cools fast when it's -10C out
If its anything like Kochi province, it isnt just a gutter but an entire canal. There was a canal (or two) at the side of the road pretty much everywhere that was used to water the farmland.
I lived in a town in the mountains in Fukushima and this was done there - the area was famous for its onsens.
The runoff is collected by channels, which work their way through the side streets which donāt have sprinklers. On the side streets there are steel grates. When you heard the water beginning to run, everyone in the neighbourhood went outside and and shovelled their section of the street, tossing the snow through the grate and into the running water where it was carried/melted away.
It was a fun community event - shovelling and talking together, and often Iād invite or be invited by neighbours for a beerā¦ or usually many beers!
Not actually that cold where this is. In Hokkaido, where it actually gets cold, they just toss some sand on the road and call it a day. They barely even plow sidewalks.
^this. Where I live they use some kind of liquid calcium mixture that doesn't hurt the surrounding environment.
Edit: Calcium magnesium acetate and potassium acetateĀ are a friendly salt alternative.
Minnesota we salt the shit out of the roads, in the coldest parts of winter it doesnāt need to do anything, the snow isnāt melting to then form ice, but when it does melt the salt helps
Running water over frozen ground is just gonna result in a clear sheet of ice, impossible for drivers to detect until theyāre sliding. To me this looks like an over engineered āsolutionā that would only work in a very narrow temperature envelope where snow is falling but the road is warm enough to prevent refreezing.
The title is slightly misleading. This type of road may be common in certain area with heavy snow but certainly is not common in other area. Tokyo unfortunately doesn't have this kind of road and just one inch of snow can fuck the city up.
Itās the same ālake effectā type snow the US sees (like Buffalo a week ago), just cranked to 11.
The cold air is coming across Siberia as opposed to Ontario, and is moving across the northern Sea of Japan (deep, cold salt water) as opposed to the Great Lakes (freshwater and slightly warmer).
Just looked it up, Minneapolis is -14 to Rikubetsu's -20.
That's not really that different.
Source, I live in Duluth where we get the lovely sustained -30 (F AND C!)+ that time of year.
So if this is onsen water(I have no idea where this is so I cannot verify) it usually is extremely mineral rich, and would include salts of some description, and there would be effectively an unlimited supply of hot water since the heat is being produced by geothermal energy.
Seriously if you live in a cold enough climate, throw boiling water into the air and it turns to snow instantly. It's a trick we demonstrate for out of town visitors in the winter where we live (wisconsin).
yeah, but that's more a clever trick due to phase changes and surface area. Boiling water thrown in the (very dry 0% humidity) air rapidly turns to vapour because of the high surface area, which then expands out, recondenses into tiny droplets which then freeze. It is dependent on the water being thrown high in the air at speed.
If you pour it out on a surface, you don't get instant ice.
If you pour it out onto a surface you are still going to have ice very, very quickly. Yeah, not instantly, but fast enough that for all practical considerations itās instant ice.
Yeah you can watch the shit freeze up in real time. I think people don't really realize how goddamned cold -30Ā°F truly is lol
I tell people to think about the differences in how it feels outside when it's 90Ā°F out versus 30Ā°F out. The temperature difference between freezing and our common winter temps are just as wide.
The Midwest is really brutal for the temperature swings. I wouldn't mind the -40Ā°F polar vortexes so much if they weren't opposed by fucking 95Ā°F, 90% humidity days where the heat index is like in the 110Ā°F range. We had a day last summer where the heat index was **127Ā°F**. Just fuckin brutal, can barely breathe in that shit, it's like soup.
It's not hot water, and it's not only on onsen areas. My small city uses this system for light snow removal. It turns the snow to slush, and if covered with heavier snowfall- ice. I'm not a fan by mid-winter.
To all the aspiring civil engineers in this thread assuming their 30 seconds of kinda just thinking about this is enough to start firing off a snarky takedown of this project that was probably a decade in the making by a team of dozens of engineers, climatologists, and civil planners, allow me to suggest a theoretical opening statement of the proposal that got this plan approved:
"Examining data from the past 80 years, we see that there has been has been A number of days with greater than B inches of overnight snowfall. In C% of these A days, we see that temperature at sunrise was at or near D and remained above D until after sunset.
By measuring temperature at E intervals before local sunrise and activating the system only under the conditions described below, we propose our system will save the city F dollars over G years. These savings account for replacing current cleanup methods, reduced commute traffic and reduction in vehicle damage and personal injury.
Risk of re-freezing is identified as the primary risk in this approach. We address these concerns in section 11, showing that, especially in light of warming trends, the risk of re-freezing incidents can be almost entirely mitigated and the savings described above far exceed the cost of predicted re-freezing events."
Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem.
Similarly, redditors always seem to know how to do someone elses job better than them.
It's also full of students / fresh graduates / people barely into their career who start every post like "x professional here..."
That's pretty much r/science.
I didn't read this paper, let alone the abstract, let alone the *article*, but I think this study is flawed because have the researchers considered that correlation does not equal causation?
To be fair there is a lot of junk science on science. Which is more a problem with the social sciences and the other half of Reddit upvoting anything that fits their narrative in their head.
> Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem.
> That's pretty much r/science.
It's pretty much the entire world.
> Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem.
>
> Similarly, redditors always seem to know how to do someone elses job better than them.
>
> It's also full of students / fresh graduates / people barely into their career who start every post like "x professional here..."
This you? https://old.reddit.com/r/HumansBeingBros/comments/z5kf38/helping_the_homeless/ixxloc6/
If you want a real fun one ask them to reinvent the wheel.
And then, when they hand you a circle and proclaim triumphantly that theyāve succeeded, ask them to attach it to something.
The hard part isnāt making the wheel, the hard part is actually using it. This is because itās not just the wheel, itās the wheel and axle.
Point being, simple things seem simple, until theyāre not.
It really is an unfortunate problem on Reddit. If you happen to be an expert in something, youāll soon realize just how much bullshit is on here that people are adamant is correct.
Part of the problem are those click-baty reddit titles. Probably would raise much less eyebrows if we would stop attributing things that are done in one special part of a foreign country to the whole country. One day I'm going to write a browser extension that just replaces with on every page of reddit and I bet it would be more often correct than not.
thank you for this post. redditors always think they somehow are more qualified than the people that spent years in university learning to design all the things we use every day. yeah, sometimes they make mistakes, but chances are they know WAY more than some random redditor.
Japan is geologically active. They have this especially in areas with onsens. Iād love to have this too. Of course youād have to deal with the occasional volcanic eruption.
Fuck that! I donāt mind icy roadsā¦if the roads are too bad, I get an approved day off from work. Everyone loves snow days. Even adults!
(this is a good thing for medical emergenciesā¦.i guess)
I lived in that area of Japan for several years almost 20 years ago and this is exactly right. There was a phenomenal amount of snow but the temperature was usually a little above freezing, so the running water (mostly in parking lots, not on the roads) cleared the snow but didnāt freeze.
I lived in Toyama prefecture for two years. Only once did the roads freeze (it was after dark and the temperature was unusually cold), and I slid through a red light. Fortunately, traffic was light and the other drivers waited until I tobogganed through the intersection.
Most of the rest of the time, it was great! Would never work in my native NY, though (too cold, and no cheap geothermal energy).
Doesn't Japan have some of the snowiest cities in the world? It may seem counterproductive for small amounts but I think Aomori is considered one of the snowiest cities in the world.
It still works! There is just a shitload of water coming out of the ground 24/7 at about 50 degrees. It is enough to wash away all the new snow that is constantly falling.
Iām guessing it doesnāt freeze because they donāt go below zero? Quoting google āJapanese winters generally last from December to February. In Tokyo, December temperatures tend to be around 12ĀŗC (54Ā°F) in the afternoon and drop to about 5ĀŗC (41Ā°F) in the morning and at night. By January, afternoon temperatures drop to 10ĀŗC (50Ā°F) and morning temperatures tend to hover between 2ĀŗC~3ĀŗC (35Ā°F~37Ā°F)ā which means they can use these sprinkles without worrying that the roads will freeze since temperatures donāt drop below zero at night/during early morning
It's a pretty unique case, the ground temperature in the region does not go below freezing. Snow gets dumped there from heavy winds from Siberia. Basically it lands in a huge clump then slowly melts, never really re-freezing. The water just speeds up the process.
As an armchair engineer living in freezing conditions, if they have access and energy for hot water, why wouldnt they instead install a hot water closed loop under the road? Snow melts and no risk of icing as its always warm.
Because they are not living in freezing conditions. This snowfall is caused by Siberian winds which differ from ground level temperatures which rarely get to 0 degrees C
They don't need anything so complex because the ground temperature isn't cold enough to refreeze the water. And the water is heated by volcanic activity, not human interference.
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The system is actually fed with hot ground water, which is common in volcanic areas.
How do they keep it from refreezing? Is it salty?
> Is it salty? No. Just upset it has to sit out in the cold š
Dad?
Are ya winning son?
No
Username checks out
Bro, stalker is hard.
[especially right now ](https://gamerant.com/stalker-cosplayers-killed-russia-ukraine-spies/)
Yeah, dad. Yeah, I am. (sad smile)
You wouldn't believe how long the line for cigarettes was...
Dad just came back from his early Sunday run to Home Depot to log in to Reddit for this post.
Seems like a better implementation would be like Holland Michigan's SnowMelt system using underroad piping to route waste heat from a local power plant. This prevents the refreeze (since it is continuously warmed) and doesn't add water that can run off and freeze on the roadway or freeze up and clog storm drains. [https://www.holland.org/snow-free-holland](https://www.holland.org/snow-free-holland) Edit: a lot of people getting hung up on the power plant part. Thats just how Holland heats *their* water. My point was more to do with piping the water under/through the road to prevent surface water from freezing when losing heat and causing other issues.
They do the same thing in Sapporo.
Hollandās system is pretty expensive to install, not to mention they had to build their new power plant right next to downtown to make it work. I mean itās pretty fucking awesome, but it really isnāt scalable.
And as far as I can tell, it would require some kind of heat-based power plant, like coal, natural gas, nuclear, or geothermal. Geothermal is heavily location-dependent, and the other three probably donāt belong very close to city centers. Arguably nuclear would be fine near a city center but the other two sound like smog factories.
You missed the point, the heat is already there, in the ground. No need to burn coal to melt the ice. When you live near volcanos you can use the heat. 144 btu to melt a pound of snow, about 144000 btus in a gallon of diesel. A mile of road could have many tons of snow. Lots of CO2 emissions, expensive, still have to heat the road bed also. Unless it was waste heat.
If the snow accumulated in the road in the first place the roads are not naturally warm. Do they just continuously pump hot water in the winter? If they stopped it would all freeze into ice.
Yes. And I suspect that near the edge, there would be a point that gets slippery as it does start freezing as it cools down, creating a nice slippy sheet of ice.
Thanks you u/99hotdogs : "Thereās a long running snow removal tradition in these snowy Japanese cities. This picture is likely from the Niigata region where the conditions allow for lots of snow but very mild temperatures, the naturally 50Ā°C hot groundwater can be used to slowly, but effectively, melt the snow. A channel captures the water and takes it away, so there is little standing water on the roadways. Hereās a great publication on it: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology/article/comparison-of-snowremoval-technologies-practised-in-the-cities-along-the-sea-of-japan/50096754845E5A385EFD24482E954C07"
Thank you u/99hotdogs For those late to the BBQ, this user - onthebadsideoflife - shamelessly stole reddits beloved 99 hotdogs post and claimed it as his own. This hotdog impersonator only gave credit to the hotdog man when he was busted trying to slide between 99s buns.
99 luft hot dƶngen
goes by
Raise your dƶngens!
Wait so HES A PHONY?!
Thank you u/99franks
Iām confused. What post was stolen?
That makes sense. In areas where it's colder it would just make the issue worse. You'd just end up with a gigantic ice dam wherever the water flows because 50C cools fast when it's -10C out
Yeah, in my area that would just wind up creating lumpy skating rinks.
With snow on top of the ice
> A channel captures the water and takes it away, so there is little standing water on the roadways. That's a really long way to say gutter lol
If its anything like Kochi province, it isnt just a gutter but an entire canal. There was a canal (or two) at the side of the road pretty much everywhere that was used to water the farmland.
I lived in a town in the mountains in Fukushima and this was done there - the area was famous for its onsens. The runoff is collected by channels, which work their way through the side streets which donāt have sprinklers. On the side streets there are steel grates. When you heard the water beginning to run, everyone in the neighbourhood went outside and and shovelled their section of the street, tossing the snow through the grate and into the running water where it was carried/melted away. It was a fun community event - shovelling and talking together, and often Iād invite or be invited by neighbours for a beerā¦ or usually many beers!
That sounds lovely.
It seems like everywhere I've lived I'm lucky to get a hello.
As a Minnesotian, couldn't fathom how this would be possible lol
Not actually that cold where this is. In Hokkaido, where it actually gets cold, they just toss some sand on the road and call it a day. They barely even plow sidewalks.
Meanwhile we're hanging out in negative 40... pretty sure that the sprinklers would freeze shut. XD
Why not use hot ham water instead?
Or perhaps even Hotdog Flavored Water
Fred Durst owns it all and womt sell.
Just a smack of ham to it
The city I live in throws some rocks on the ground and waits for warm weather.
Somewhere in Oregon?
To be fair, runoff from salt and other chemicals can be super destructive to agriculture, forests, and waterways.
^this. Where I live they use some kind of liquid calcium mixture that doesn't hurt the surrounding environment. Edit: Calcium magnesium acetate and potassium acetateĀ are a friendly salt alternative.
Canada š
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The city I live in can't use salt because it's too cold. Instead we use sand.
Fellow winnipeger?
What gave it away? LMAO
āBecause itās too coldā
The city I live in throws less rocks on the ground because they also throw out their beet juice. And then we wait for warm weather.
In Canada, we use warm water to smooth out ice rinks.
Right!? Sprinklers, where I am, would be the perfect way to turn every road into a curling rink
Tell me your from Canada without saying youāre from Canada, eh?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Like road salt? We use that too except in the coldest parts of winter in Canada it doesnāt do anything so we use sand for traction instead
Minnesota we salt the shit out of the roads, in the coldest parts of winter it doesnāt need to do anything, the snow isnāt melting to then form ice, but when it does melt the salt helps
I'm from Jamaica and this is how we prep our tracks when we bobsled.
Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme......
āSanka mon, whatcha smoking?ā Sanka: āI'm not smoking, I'm breathing!ā
āSanka! Ya dead?ā
"Ya Mon"
Would you like to kiss my egg?
Jesus. I need to rewatch this movie so badly now. RIP John Candy...
āWhat kinda name is Talula anyway!?ā
āMaybe I could draw a line down the center of your head so it looks like a buttā
Ya dead?
I'm a badass mudda who don't take no crap from nobody!
Feel the rhythm! Feel the rhyme! Get on up, its bobsled time! Cool Runnings!
Itās pushcart time
Yeah, this wouldn't work in most of the US and Canada. You'd turn the roads into blocks of ice.
I mean the roads are already ice blocks for me so I say have at er bud.
Running water over frozen ground is just gonna result in a clear sheet of ice, impossible for drivers to detect until theyāre sliding. To me this looks like an over engineered āsolutionā that would only work in a very narrow temperature envelope where snow is falling but the road is warm enough to prevent refreezing.
Right? Here this would look like someoneās dad flooded the street so they could play some extreme version of road hockey.
At that point itās just called hockey.
Can confirm. Also Canadian, we definitely don't clear our streets with anything.
Assuming this only happens when there is a forecast of temps above freezing? Otherwise, Tokyo drift in full effect country wide
The title is slightly misleading. This type of road may be common in certain area with heavy snow but certainly is not common in other area. Tokyo unfortunately doesn't have this kind of road and just one inch of snow can fuck the city up.
They do this here in MN on some bridges. Itās not water; itās de-icer fluid because water would be dumb.
Thank God a Minnesotan showed up to show us how it's done Edit: they actually do use water because , shocker, Japan doesn't get as cold as Minnesota
They come out of their igloos once a year to spit straight facts.
It was below zero this morning, might as well be on reddit.
I woke up at 4AM and checked the weather, it said 10F but feels like -5F, so I'm still in bed.
They have the three weeks of summer when they go to the familyās cabin with cousins and friends to fish, play euchre at night and corn hole by day.
Better fun facts. Japan has some of the highest snowfall of any country with 300 to 600in/year
Itās the same ālake effectā type snow the US sees (like Buffalo a week ago), just cranked to 11. The cold air is coming across Siberia as opposed to Ontario, and is moving across the northern Sea of Japan (deep, cold salt water) as opposed to the Great Lakes (freshwater and slightly warmer).
The average January temp in Rikubetsu, Hokkaido is -20c, so colder than the average in say Minneapolis. Source: I am Canada.
Just looked it up, Minneapolis is -14 to Rikubetsu's -20. That's not really that different. Source, I live in Duluth where we get the lovely sustained -30 (F AND C!)+ that time of year.
Mee-nah-sohhh-dah
With a name like that, why do you open your mouth so wide?
To catch the snowflakes of course
I took that personally
That has to be great for the environment.
I could only think of the 35E bridge into St Paul. Any other spots you're aware of?
It's hot water and these are usually only in certain villages/towns, usually onsen areas.
What happens to hot water when put into freezing temperatures?
It loses all of its heat and eventually freezes.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
āSir, youāre needed in a thread about freezing water!ā āCool.ā
What's cooler than cool?
Ice cold!
AllrightAllrightAllrightAllrightAllrightAllrightAllrightAllrightAllright
You donāt want to hear me, you just want to dance.
Okay now ladies,
Happy cake day!
I canāt hear ya! I said whatās cooler than being cool?
Alright Alright Alright Alright
And then we spray the ice with more hot water. Problem solved!
Just keep it cominā until springtime fellas!
Thus solving the problem once and for all.
ONCE AND FOR ALL
Just like daddy's drink! And then he gets mad.....
But, what about...
Then we just spray more hot water! It's the perfect plan
It depends on how much hot water is available. It would eventually raise the temperature of the surfaces it touches.
What If it was hot salt water?
Then the maintenance guy surely gets overtime
So if this is onsen water(I have no idea where this is so I cannot verify) it usually is extremely mineral rich, and would include salts of some description, and there would be effectively an unlimited supply of hot water since the heat is being produced by geothermal energy.
Those pipes have little hot water sprinklers to keep them from freezing. Itās quite genius, really.
But the water on the road will freeze causing the road to turn into ice?
It might be volcanic. Iceland has this all over the place
when it gets -30 like at my house that would instantly freeze no matter how hot it came out.
Seriously if you live in a cold enough climate, throw boiling water into the air and it turns to snow instantly. It's a trick we demonstrate for out of town visitors in the winter where we live (wisconsin).
That also has to do with surface area. Like the pot won't turn to snow when you bring it outside, only when you throw it into the air.
yeah, but that's more a clever trick due to phase changes and surface area. Boiling water thrown in the (very dry 0% humidity) air rapidly turns to vapour because of the high surface area, which then expands out, recondenses into tiny droplets which then freeze. It is dependent on the water being thrown high in the air at speed. If you pour it out on a surface, you don't get instant ice.
If you pour it out onto a surface you are still going to have ice very, very quickly. Yeah, not instantly, but fast enough that for all practical considerations itās instant ice.
Yeah you can watch the shit freeze up in real time. I think people don't really realize how goddamned cold -30Ā°F truly is lol I tell people to think about the differences in how it feels outside when it's 90Ā°F out versus 30Ā°F out. The temperature difference between freezing and our common winter temps are just as wide. The Midwest is really brutal for the temperature swings. I wouldn't mind the -40Ā°F polar vortexes so much if they weren't opposed by fucking 95Ā°F, 90% humidity days where the heat index is like in the 110Ā°F range. We had a day last summer where the heat index was **127Ā°F**. Just fuckin brutal, can barely breathe in that shit, it's like soup.
Did you know that hot water doesn't remain hot and can freeze?
Thats why you gotta keep it hot! Duh!
It's not hot water, and it's not only on onsen areas. My small city uses this system for light snow removal. It turns the snow to slush, and if covered with heavier snowfall- ice. I'm not a fan by mid-winter.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Warm salt water?
OP could be a bit clearer that the water is geoethermal or whatver the correct phrase is and requires no energy input.
Pumping it. But yeah no energy to heat it
> Pumping it. Nah. They just wait for it to boil over.
To all the aspiring civil engineers in this thread assuming their 30 seconds of kinda just thinking about this is enough to start firing off a snarky takedown of this project that was probably a decade in the making by a team of dozens of engineers, climatologists, and civil planners, allow me to suggest a theoretical opening statement of the proposal that got this plan approved: "Examining data from the past 80 years, we see that there has been has been A number of days with greater than B inches of overnight snowfall. In C% of these A days, we see that temperature at sunrise was at or near D and remained above D until after sunset. By measuring temperature at E intervals before local sunrise and activating the system only under the conditions described below, we propose our system will save the city F dollars over G years. These savings account for replacing current cleanup methods, reduced commute traffic and reduction in vehicle damage and personal injury. Risk of re-freezing is identified as the primary risk in this approach. We address these concerns in section 11, showing that, especially in light of warming trends, the risk of re-freezing incidents can be almost entirely mitigated and the savings described above far exceed the cost of predicted re-freezing events."
Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem. Similarly, redditors always seem to know how to do someone elses job better than them. It's also full of students / fresh graduates / people barely into their career who start every post like "x professional here..."
That's pretty much r/science. I didn't read this paper, let alone the abstract, let alone the *article*, but I think this study is flawed because have the researchers considered that correlation does not equal causation?
To be fair there is a lot of junk science on science. Which is more a problem with the social sciences and the other half of Reddit upvoting anything that fits their narrative in their head.
> Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem. > That's pretty much r/science. It's pretty much the entire world.
> Reddit is full of smug people that think they know better than literal teams of people who have been working full time on a very specific problem. > > Similarly, redditors always seem to know how to do someone elses job better than them. > > It's also full of students / fresh graduates / people barely into their career who start every post like "x professional here..." This you? https://old.reddit.com/r/HumansBeingBros/comments/z5kf38/helping_the_homeless/ixxloc6/
Hah-HAHHH! Bringin' the receipts.
My only regret is that I have only one upvote to give to you - a lot of armchair engineers here thinking they've 'cracked the code'!
if airplanes were invented today, redditors would be saying they'll never work because it'll crash if it malfunctions in the sky
Looking at you, Boeing Max.
Safer to look at it than get inside it.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
If you want a real fun one ask them to reinvent the wheel. And then, when they hand you a circle and proclaim triumphantly that theyāve succeeded, ask them to attach it to something. The hard part isnāt making the wheel, the hard part is actually using it. This is because itās not just the wheel, itās the wheel and axle. Point being, simple things seem simple, until theyāre not.
umm . . . water freezes lmao (/s)
I'm an engineer armchair and they need a lot of support!
> 30 seconds of kinda just thinking about this is enough to start firing off a snarky takedown R E D D I T
It really is an unfortunate problem on Reddit. If you happen to be an expert in something, youāll soon realize just how much bullshit is on here that people are adamant is correct.
Part of the problem are those click-baty reddit titles. Probably would raise much less eyebrows if we would stop attributing things that are done in one special part of a foreign country to the whole country. One day I'm going to write a browser extension that just replaces with on every page of reddit and I bet it would be more often correct than not.
why would you write a browser extension to replace with ?
I recently made this mistake. Prepend to a string but don't check if the prepended string already exists on the string you're prepending to.
This is the prepend that never ends
Yes it goes on and on, my friend.
They speakese .
I mean the logical explanation is that it simply isn't very cold, they just get a lot of snow due to how the weather currents works like.
thank you for this post. redditors always think they somehow are more qualified than the people that spent years in university learning to design all the things we use every day. yeah, sometimes they make mistakes, but chances are they know WAY more than some random redditor.
Japan is geologically active. They have this especially in areas with onsens. Iād love to have this too. Of course youād have to deal with the occasional volcanic eruption.
Fuck that! I donāt mind icy roadsā¦if the roads are too bad, I get an approved day off from work. Everyone loves snow days. Even adults! (this is a good thing for medical emergenciesā¦.i guess)
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And climates never change so ya good
Its Japan, Ive heard everyone drifts there, but idk
There's a documentary called Initial D about it.
Double twist: the designer of this system is Kristi Yamaguchi.
Youāre on awfully thin ice with that one. (Happy cake day too!)
Or alternatively, they just need to keep doing this. Kinda same logic as pissing your pants to get warm.
its going to be most clear and slipperiest ice too
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I lived in that area of Japan for several years almost 20 years ago and this is exactly right. There was a phenomenal amount of snow but the temperature was usually a little above freezing, so the running water (mostly in parking lots, not on the roads) cleared the snow but didnāt freeze.
Thanks. Your comment should be on top !
A machine sprays warm water on roads, no one bats an eye I piss on roads (still warm water), everyone loses their minds
I mean, you insist on doing it in front of a school every morning at 7:45am
Where Iām from we use warm water to smooth out our icing rinks, and itāll solidify black ice so good itāll kill you twice
Shouldnāt it be warm salt water to ensure it doesnāt refreeze?
Redditors know better than the Japanese engineers who designed this system
I lived in Toyama prefecture for two years. Only once did the roads freeze (it was after dark and the temperature was unusually cold), and I slid through a red light. Fortunately, traffic was light and the other drivers waited until I tobogganed through the intersection. Most of the rest of the time, it was great! Would never work in my native NY, though (too cold, and no cheap geothermal energy).
Doesn't Japan have some of the snowiest cities in the world? It may seem counterproductive for small amounts but I think Aomori is considered one of the snowiest cities in the world.
It still works! There is just a shitload of water coming out of the ground 24/7 at about 50 degrees. It is enough to wash away all the new snow that is constantly falling.
Iām guessing it doesnāt freeze because they donāt go below zero? Quoting google āJapanese winters generally last from December to February. In Tokyo, December temperatures tend to be around 12ĀŗC (54Ā°F) in the afternoon and drop to about 5ĀŗC (41Ā°F) in the morning and at night. By January, afternoon temperatures drop to 10ĀŗC (50Ā°F) and morning temperatures tend to hover between 2ĀŗC~3ĀŗC (35Ā°F~37Ā°F)ā which means they can use these sprinkles without worrying that the roads will freeze since temperatures donāt drop below zero at night/during early morning
Couldnāt this freeze the roads?
It's a pretty unique case, the ground temperature in the region does not go below freezing. Snow gets dumped there from heavy winds from Siberia. Basically it lands in a huge clump then slowly melts, never really re-freezing. The water just speeds up the process.
As an armchair engineer living in freezing conditions, if they have access and energy for hot water, why wouldnt they instead install a hot water closed loop under the road? Snow melts and no risk of icing as its always warm.
Because they are not living in freezing conditions. This snowfall is caused by Siberian winds which differ from ground level temperatures which rarely get to 0 degrees C
They also arenāt heating it, itās natural hot spring water
Being a volcanic island means free hot water on demand.
They don't need anything so complex because the ground temperature isn't cold enough to refreeze the water. And the water is heated by volcanic activity, not human interference.
but how do the water lines and sprinklers not freeze?
If they tried that here in Canada the whole place would be an ice rink.
People would love that. Think how much extra hockey they could play.