Diatribe: Winter’s here – break out the tire chains

• Reprints

With the bad economic times the world has faced for the past too many years it seems there’s a nostalgic yearning for traditions, rituals, habits, what have you.

When it comes to auto-related traditions, few examples carry more nostalgia than tire chains.

No, I’m not high on Ovaltine. It’s just this time of year, when the temperatures turn cold and the wonderful scent of burning fireplace logs permeates the senses that I look back on my youth as a Hoosier.

I’ve mentioned many times that my family owned junkyards when I was a kid. They weren’t automotive recycling centers back then, they were junkyards. In October and November we would get dozens or more customers per day who wanted to buy tire chains in preparation for winter driving. We had them by the ton (literally) and sales were brisk.

In northwest Indiana we were constantly subjected to lake-effect snow – and with the resultant moisture the roads were often treacherously slippery from the inevitable ice. Slap some chains on your rear tires (there wasn’t such a thing as front-wheel drive in those days) and you stood a fighting chance of not having to call my dad to come by with a tow truck and drag you out of a ditch.

There was also a lovely side effect of tire-chained vehicles: When the pavement was dry it would sound like hundreds of sleighs driving down the road because of the metal clinking over the concrete. Ah, what halcyon times.

As the decades went by and doomsayers roamed the halls of government buildings, the thought became planted in the heads of legislators that tires chains were ruining our planet – starting with our roads. Listening to them you’d swear that huge craterlike chunks were breaking loose at almost every mile because the chains were acting like a grader and tearing up the concrete to the point that each year they had to be repaved.

I believe it was around this same period in time that the major tire manufacturers were developing specialty tires for snow, rain, ice and other seasonal conditions. Coincidence? You decide.

At the same time, studded tires became the rage. They’d generally go on in the late fall and swap out with regular tires around midspring. They weren’t as effective as tire chains but they did offer a fighting chance because their little steel tips dug into the concrete and provided some traction. However, just like the chain gang, studded tires also became verboten.

In neither instance do I recall major, or even minor, permanent damage being done to concrete slabs. It’s just like the hysteria surrounding mercury. Heck, when we were in grade school we used to play with mercury because it was fun to try to scoot the bubbles along a flat surface. It also was great for cleaning coins. Soon mercury was gone and the only way you could buy it was to go to a car dealer. Now even Mercury cars are gone. But, I digress

Maybe it was because road construction was so much better back then; maybe when roads did require patching it was done more professionally than having highway workers throw shovels full of blacktop into a tire-eating hole and relying on the kindness of drivers to tamp it down. Maybe it was because there was relatively little traffic back then or maybe it’s because there are now trucks – particularly in Michigan – that have 42 wheels and are loaded with gravel.

Tire chains are still allowed in some of the higher elevations in the western mountain states. With all the technology and engineers we have, there surely could be some compromise made where tire chains could be concrete friendly, thus killing (pardon the pun) two birds with one stone.

Maybe we can learn to alter the weather so we don’t have snowstorms anymore. There would be no need for tire chains or even specialty tires. Then some day in the future I could write a rant waxing nostalgic about the Bridgestone Blizzak tires, a winter tire that was so good it was banned for the hell of it.

Al Vinikour is a Midwest-based freelance auto writer. Proving a mind is a “terrible thing to use” he sometimes sits in traffic and ponders about things — generally auto-related — that make him mad. Believing the “pen is mightier than the sword” (and generally results in a whole lot less jail time), he vents his anger through a word processor and produces the Driver’s Side Diatribe column. Email him at vinikour@comcast.net.