Sometimes you don’t intrinsically care about a topic but in the course of solving a problem you learn a bunch about it against your will. That’s me and winter tires. (For cars. Winter tires for bikes are fun and not a chore to me).
Here are my notes for … future me? My kids? In ten or fifteen years I’ll say “you should consider getting snow tires for your car, here’s the link to my blog.”
I find car stuff stressful, maybe writing this down will be cathartic.
Winter tires are worthwhile. Not having grown up in Michigan, I thought four-wheel drive was the thing for Michigan winters. I even bought a Subaru Outback. Then I learned from my car-savvy friends that winter tires make a bigger difference.
Why didn’t I have them when I lived in Chicago? I was about to blindly write that they weren’t necessary when I lived in Chicago because … the streets were plowed more? But that’s just wrong. Looking back on a few years of winter driving in Chicago:
- I slid in the snow getting on Lake Shore Drive around 2008. I hit the curb, dented my wheel, and took the world’s longest bus trips to get my Corolla back from the repair shop.
- About that time I barely made it home from work in a blizzard. The drive that normally took 25 minutes was 2+ hours. Along the way I totally lost traction on the Dan Ryan expressway. I was just sliding toward the barrier in slow-mo, wondering if I’d stop in time.
- And I have a memory from some unknown age of trying to turn left across Lake Park Ave in Hyde Park and instead spinning 180 degrees into the oncoming lanes.
I was lucky to get away in all of those cases! I should have had winter tires in Chicago, storage would have been more annoying but I could have figured it out.