The snow keeps coming down in the Netherlands, something that has not happened for at least 15 years according to my Dutch neighbourg who uses winter tires on his car. In fact, anyone who drives to Germany, Italy and France is obliged by law to have them on their car.

Winter tires are not obligatory in the Netherlands. With serious snow falls once every decade or so, it seems logically. However, this year, with an increase in accidents, all kinds of organisations are realising that saving money has come first and safety comes second.

“Not enough buses use winter tires” claims newspaper De Gelderlander. The biggest bus company Connexxion has none and they believe it doesn’t make a difference. Arriva, a smaller bus company, uses ‘all-season’ tires, which are really good for three seasons — not snow fall or a slippery road.

All-season tires were designed for wet and dry driving, while snow tires were designed for slippery conditions and very cold temperatures. And yes, we have had both from one day to the next here.

Touring cars use winter tires because they drive to countries like Germany, and taxi and transport companies switch to winter tires as well. Both of them can’t afford accidents.

Mini-vans that transport handicapped and mentally challenged children to school in the region of Utrecht don’t use winter tires, as their bosses apparently can’t afford them and they aren’t obligatory anyways. The story on telly was that parents were upset, drivers felt bad and the municipalities said the van companies should pay for the tires and the van companies said the municipalities should subsidise them. The cheapest van company wins the transport contract, so including winter tires is a big no-no. And saving money comes before safety again.

Recap: winter tires are good when the road is covered with snow and is slippery. All-seasons are good in many conditions, but don’t have the grip of winter tires and braking takes longer, which is dangerous. Ordinary tires are cheaper, but much more dangerous altogether in winter conditions. Winter tires are rarely needed and aren’t obligatory, but it is risky.

For days on end, when the snow kept coming down, the Dutch automobile association and Dutch road safety association told people to stay home altogether, which gives you an indication of how dangerous they thought the road was no matter what tires you had on your car.

(Link: gelderlander.nl)

The city of Etten-Leur in Noord-Brabant has purchased 18 tonnes of bath salts to sprinkle roads with, in an attempt to keep the roads from freezing.

Salt lowers the temperature at which water freezes. Municipalities and Rijkswaterstaat keep about 100,000 tonnes of coarse ’strooizout’ (lit. sprinkling salt) ready to keep roads clear from snow and black ice at temperatures of about -10 degrees Celsius or higher. Because of this year’s wintry conditions, some municipalities have already run out of stock.

Etten-Leur’s bath salt stems from a batch condemned by its producers. Some of the salt already had perfume and colouring added. The city expects to not have to use its bath salts, as new shipments of regular road salt is expected to arrive this weekend. According to Radio Netherlands, “the coloured bath salts smell of lavender, green tea and mango.”

The minister of internal affairs, Guusje ter Horst, has given the green light to produce more road salt than usual, despite environmental concerns. Strooizout is a very aggressive product that can rust cars faster, changing the selection of fauna along roads, leading to maritime plants growing inland.

(Photo by Flickr user sburke2478, some rights reserved)

The fire brigade got tipped twice that smoke had been spotted along motorway A4 in Hoofddorp, North Holland and both times, it was just a smoking advert. Car insurance company Ditzo had a big billboard advert with a time-clock giving off a lot of smoke, as if the Audi in the advert had car trouble. Motorists called 112 (the Dutch emergency number), as apparently the ‘joke’ was not very obvious. The marketing people probably thought this was brillant and it is a cool idea, except when in actual practice it fails and causes problems.

Allow me to show you what it looks like when you do this right, and by right I mean without causing panic and maybe even up for yet another award. Cossette Communications in Canada had a steam machine built into a bus shelter giving off periodic burts to announce that coffee was ready, which you can read straight away and which doesn’t make you want to call 911 (North American emergency number). I file this one under ‘zo kan het ook’, which means ‘it can also be done this way’.

(Link: webregio.nl)

I just got back from walking down my street at 7 am in the dark (Happy Winter Solstice) with bikers negotiating the snow and cars taking the onramp to the motorway near my house at 30 km/h like well-behaved cars.

So far, buses are generally not running. I’m guessing they don’t sport winter tires or radials (aka four-season tires). Putting winter tires on your car once every 10 years is not practical or good value for money in the Netherlands. Yes, they are tons of accidents, literally piling up (pardon the pun). My neighbour goes skiing every year in Austria and just switched tires because they are mandatory in winter in Germany, and has to drive through there.

Trains are running minimally, so I bet the delays are really nasty. Many taxis won’t be driving around and so people trying to get to work are going to have to come up with dog sleds or walk. Speaking of trains, while I whine about not being able to woosh to Paris at a proper speed, the famous Eurostar train that runs in the Chunnel between Britain and France has been cancelled for days now, never mind the people who were trapped in it Friday night.

And then there’s the airplanes. North American and European airports all have tons of delayed flights, as well as airports just closing shop all together like in Belgium, as seen on Dutch telly. Picture stranded passengers off to visit friends and family for Christmas, tired and sleeping on airport benches.

I still don’t understand why the Netherlands can plan for terrorist attacks that will probably never happen, but plan so little when it comes to serious snow, a more realistic situation. In real Northern countries like Norway and Canada, sure we’re having problems getting around too, but if we were to shut down the country for a bit of snow at just -1 Celsius, we might as well dismantle all Scandinavian countries, Russia, Canada and the Northern United States.

Granted, de-icing planes is international and trains can’t deal with autumn leaves properly (I still don’t understand why), but winter tires on buses, cars and taxis would have avoided many problems so far, methinks.

Again, we really seem to stink at planning ahead realistically. I’m loving all this snow, but then I have a home office. This was the view outside my window yesterday. And just as I finished writing this, it started snowing again.

Golly gee whiz darn! The police of the province of Drenthe, a region that boasts mostly farms and open spaces, can’t fine enough drivers of any kind and can’t meet their quotas. They don’t do naughty things like drive through red lights, they wear helmets on motorbikes and scooters, and don’t drink and drive. Sadly, the province is missing out on a lot of income due to the respect for the law in Drenthe and there’s of course nothing the police can do to turn people into asocial SOBs like in the rest of the country.

No wait, I have an idea: let the cops abuse people. Beat them up for nothing and kick tail lights in. It works wonders.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: a Grecav Eke pick-up microcar, by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

News from the tech trenches.

- The Nuna 5 solar powered car ran into a ditch last Saturday while preparing for the annual World Solar Challenge, writes Telegraaf (Dutch). The student-built car was driving at a speed of 110 kph at the time. Driver Jelle managed to get out unhurt, but several components of the car, including the solar panel, turned out to be damaged. The team from Delft University expects to have repaired the damage before the October 25 start.

See here for a drag race between Nuna 5 and its predecessor, Nuna 4, during happier times.

- Layar (augmented reality) includes an application that will let you spot the houses of the famous called BN’er Verkenner (Celeb Scout). US actor Brad Pitt, enjoying a quite afternoon in his Amsterdam canal house, was its victim in this video posted at Engadget.

Layar is a mobile phone tool that adds a geographic layer to your Android phone’s operating system, letting you check out what’s available near your current location.

- The Netherlands has its own space organisation. The NSO (Netherlands Space Office) was kickstarted last Wednesday by Minister Maria van der Hoeven (Economic Affairs) and astronaut André Kuipers. The NSO is supposed to help design and build a Dutch space programme, according to Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch).

Kuipers was recently selected for a half-year stay at the International Space Station starting December 2010.

(The illustration is a mock-up by me, not an actual NSO lifting body design space craft on top of a Soyuz rocket. Photo of a Soyuz rocket by NASA.
Photo of a big clog by Jocelyn Kinny, some rights reserved.)

The E-Kart or Electric Kart is an experiment to see “whether we can somehow conceive our own home-built electric vehicle—we bought an old go kart frame and converted it to a zero emission kart, using parts from an electric scooter,” according to its makers, Anthony Liekens and Walter Schreppers.

I talked to Liekens at HAR. The electric scooter was used simply because they had one available from China that wasn’t rated for use on the road in Belgium, and also because this solution was cheaper than getting the required parts separately. Originally, they wanted to buy an electric motor that would draw 4800 watts. The current scooter-based model uses 500 watts.

When I visited E-Kart Village, Anthonie was mourning a flat front tire, but in true hacker spirit, he told me that they were looking into the many and diverse applications of duck tape to overcome this problem. And sure enough, a day later I saw the kart zip across the campground again.

The E-Kart has a top speed of 23 km/h, and because it can access all its torque immediately, accelerates very fast. The E-Kart blog has lots more info, including videos and a complete, illustrated history.

Now it’s off for me to the last of the talks of HAR 2009. I hope you enjoyed reading about the camp as much as I enjoyed attending.

Update: I appear to have forgotten to include the link to the E-Kart blog, an oversight I have now corrected (see first paragraph)—B.

Together with his friend Tom van Ees (left), Martin de Vries, 35, (right), plans to drive by motorbike from their hometown Den Bosch (’s-Hertogenbosch) all the way to Kazakhstan, his brother proudly started telling people online the other day.

Saturday, 15 August, they will set off on a 17,000 km route to the capital of Almaty and back, going through 15 countries on the way, with the goal of raising money to fight cancer. “Still one in every three people in the Netherlands gets cancer. That is way too much. We are paying for the costs of our trip ourselves, so all the money we raise will go to this great cause.”

Find out more about their plight, the blog and their pictures by visiting the specially setup website around2seas.nl.

(Link: Lykle de Vries, Photo: Martin de Vries)

Initially I spotted this delivery van on the J.M. Coenenstraat in Amsterdam simply because unlike most of its brethren it lacked any form of advertising on its sides. Only when I looked closer I noticed the URL. No, that is not ’shopped.

Down South in soft-spoken Maastricht, Limburg, the police raked in a cool EUR 2.5 million from Belgians caught for traffic violations last year, 37,417 of which were speeding violations.

And what about the Dutch on the Belgian side? An estimated 15,000 Dutch people brought in EUR 1.5 million according to the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, which is a lot less.

The amusing part is that Belgian Limburg has twice as many speed cameras as Dutch Limburg (Yes, both countries share the name of a province).

As an exercise in pure unfounded speculation, the Belgians have more physical room to get their motors going whereas in the Netherlands you’ll miss four exits if you bat your eyelids too long. Germans often get caught speeding into the Netherlands because slowing down is not fun and takes time. When you’re going a roaring 220 km for like an hour (been there, done that, yes it sucks petrol fast), slowing down to 50 km feels like going backwards in time.

(Link: blikopnieuws.nl, Photo by Wikipedia user Naaldenberg, some rights reserved.)