Salt companies, likewise, had their safest-ever year in 2007 and sold a near-record amount of live-saving highway salt.

system users—the traveling public, as well as commercial operators—are increasingly sensitive to delay and unreliable conditions. By measuring travel-time performance, and related system metrics based on travel time, agencies will be better able to plan and operate their systems to achieve the best result for a given level of investment. At the same time, travelers, shippers, and other users of those systems will have better information for planning their use of the system.

In winter storms, agencies meet their "customers'" concerns for delay and reliability through salting and plowing. Measuring road surface outcomes is the key to delivering on customer expectations.

Report 618 guides agencies to using cost-effective techniques to gather and process data enabling real-time management decisions which can significantly improve winter roadway safety.

Now comes the Virginia Department of Transportation which confessed in Friday's Post that it "bungled" the response to a February 12 ice storm that put thousands at risk and hundreds, at least, stranded in their cars on the elevated bridges of the "Mixing Bowl" in Springfield. A disastrous storm, we'd agree and the disaster compounded by VDOT's mistakes.

Congratulations, however, to VDOT for manfully stepping up and doing the right thing. Expressions of regret, even sincere and painfully public expressions, are important -- and expected. What the public should expect -- and, in this case, received -- is some evidence that things will be different next time.

We expect that VDOT does post-storm and post-season analysis of its snowfighting response efforts. That's the only way agencies can improve their performance of this life-saving service. VDOT's report, the Post summarized, identified specific failures, including that "anti-icing equipment sat unused, electronic warning signs remained dark and a motorist alert system was not updated for hours." As taxpayers and roadway users, we applaud VDOT Commissioner David Ekern's confession because it so clearly points the way forward to addressing identified shortcomings:

"We got overwhelmed," VDOT Commissioner David S. Ekern said yesterday in a telephone news conference. "We weren't prepared for the size and magnitude."

Ekern released a frank review of the agency's response to the storm, identifying errors, misjudgments and communication gaffes by VDOT workers.

"The events of February 12 were clearly unacceptable in terms of our performance," Ekern said at the news conference. "We'll learn from this, and we'll move forward."

The ice storm, which occurred at the beginning of the rush hour, closed one of the East Coast's largest highway interchanges, which was completed last year at a cost of $676 million. There were 331 traffic incidents, including 108 at the Springfield interchange between 3 p.m. and midnight, when the last ramp was reopened. About 50 injuries were reported in the region from accidents caused by the quarter-inch-thick coating of ice.

Ekern outlined a series of agency reforms and procedural changes, including developing a formal action plan for an ice storm -- VDOT does not have one -- and clarifying the chain of command. Of the more than 1,300 pieces of equipment available to the Northern Virginia VDOT district, only five are capable of anti-icing, and they are owned by contractors.

We were struck by the noted cost of this huge highway project and reminded of another multi-million number -- $205 million -- which is the DAILY COST of inadequate snowfighting in Virginia as modeled by the economic consulting firm Global Insight, Inc. These costs of failure include lost wages, lost retail sales and lost federal, state and local tax revenues payable on that economic activity. Just in terms of reducing crashes during snowstorms, applying salt to winter highways pays for itself in the first half hour after it's applied. Not a lot of government programs deliver that much bang for the buck.

Of course, we'd prefer to offer congratulations to our heroic snowfighters for their success in keeping roadways open and operating safely, but this was the next-best thing: the realistic likelihood that next winter a similiar storm will be handled with greater efficiency. Thanks for caring, VDOT.

Now, if we could only get our politicians to be such stand-up models of what to do when "mistakes were made."

Canadian discussions and studies are more advanced than in the U.S. and also predict impacts on use of road salt for winter maintenance. In "Climate Change and Ontarios's Winter Roads: Trends and Impacts on Ontario Winter Road Maintainence Ops" and "Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation: A Canadian Perspective," experts agreed that salt usage in southern and western Ontario would be unchanged by global warming, but that salt usage would increase in northern and eastern parts of the province.

The study by Cambridge Systematics estimates that traffic crashes cost each American $1,051 for a total economic burden on the economy of $164.2 billion. Data from the Texas Transportation Institute put the tab for congestion at $67.6 billion or $430 per person. With Congress readying itself to tackle reauthorization of the federal surface transportation program next year and with the federal Highway Trust Fund approaching insolvency, these measures should be front-and-center in the public policy discussion.

For years, the anti-highway lobby has inveighed against "paving over America" and the highway lobby has foolishly cast the argument in terms of the deteriorating condition of the nation's roads and bridges. Too true. And when the I-35W bridge plunged into the Mississippi, the poignancy of the roadbuilders' lament was manifest. The thought of an aging and inadequate roadway infrastructure contributing to the 42,642 people killed last year on American roads is totally unacceptable. We know most of those deaths are avoidable and now we know the cost of under-funding highway improvments.

The quality of the policy debate, however, would be improved if we move beyond contesting the number of "structurally deficient" bridges or pothole-pocked or rutted roadway surfaces. Nor should we accept the notion that we need to starve investments in congestion relief to pay for safer roads. The two go hand in hand. Non-recurring congestion (the kind not caused by "rush hour") is associated with clearing traffic crashes and combatting weather conditions like snow & ice storms that contribute so much to those crashes. Simply applying salt as part of a professional winter operations program cuts 88.3% of the injury crashes and keeps the roads reliably available for our mobile society. In fact, in most states, the cost of failing to keep winter roads open through winter maintenance operations generally costs more for each day of failure than the annual cost of snowfighting (data by Global Insight, Inc.).

As Congress sets up the debate on highway spending, let's focus attention on the outcomes we can expect our roads to deliver. We shouldn't be building roads to create jobs (or re-elect politicos) nor should we endanger drivers' lives and our national economic competitiveness by short-sightedly opposing transportation improvements due to suspicion over the self-interested motivation of construction companies. Let's measure transportation outcomes -- the service we driver are paying for through our gas taxes -- and invest to reduce the tragic waste of more than 40,000 lives every year and reverse the corrosive erosion of reliable highway mobility caused by congestion.

And let's let the engineers and the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Operations help us define the choices rather than jury-rig our national highway priorities through Congressional earmarks.

It's not AAA versus AASHTO (the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials). Both AAA and AASHTO care deeply about BOTH safety and mobility. Let's not make this mountain tougher to scale than it already is.

A better approach, they argue would be to allocate the $50 billion in annual surface transportation spending where the probems are. Cities are being shortchanged, they say.

The nation’s 100 largest metropolitan regions generate 75 percent of its economic output. They also handle 75 percent of its foreign sea cargo, 79 percent of its air cargo, and 92 percent of its air-passenger traffic. Yet of the 6,373 earmarked projects that dominate the current federal transportation law, only half are targeted at these metro areas.

And infrastructure investment is critical to jobs creation, they explain:

In the past, strategic investments in the nation’s connective tissue—to develop railroads in the 19th century and the highway system in the 20th—turbocharged growth and transformed the country. But more recently, America’s transportation infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth and evolution of the economy. As earmarks have proliferated, the government’s infrastructure investment has lost focus. A recent academic study shows that public investment in transportation in the 1970s generated a return approaching 20 percent, mostly in the form of higher productivity. Investments in the 1980s generated only a 5 percent return; in the 1990s, the return was just 1 percent.

Check out their interactive map estimating road-traffic congestion in 2010. The cost of congestion, including added freight cost and lost productivity for commuters, reached $78 billion in 2005. Half of that occurred in just 10 metro areas.

The survey found one-third (33%) of regular commuters have had their commutes affected by severe weather over the past three months. Of that segment, six in ten (61%) reported longer commuting times, nearly a quarter have been late to work (23%), one in six (16%) have had to leave early, 6% couldn't get to work at all and 5% elected to work from home rather than face the elements. Twenty percent reported lost wage income because of weather events.

In times of stress and strain, facing difficult choices, Steubenville acted prudently. The episode underscores the often-neglected but resounding imperative of effective winter maintenance and the essential role of salt as a primary weapon in the war against winter.

It's been two weeks now since officals admitted they were unprepared. More than 1.3 million soldiers have been mobilized in responding to the snow emergency.

Slow salt replenishment has spelled trouble for road agencies across the nation's hard-hit northern states, said Richard Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a nonprofit trade group in Alexandria, Va.

"We have plenty of salt," he said. "It's a question of putting it in the right place at the right time."

Localized shortages can stem from cities, particularly smaller ones, having limited storage space for road salt, and suppliers choosing where to send salt based on a community's need or the size and importance of a road department's highway network.

A spokesman for Chicago-based Morton Salt said ice on the Detroit River slowed the shipping of salt. Locally, the Detroit Salt Co. said it is delivering salt as fast as it can.

In western Michigan, the local TV station reported much the same:

"In a normal winter we'd be okay. If winter continues another two to three weeks, we'll be a little more concerned," said Jerry Byrne of the Kent County Road Commission.

So the road commission is mixing salt with sand to make the best use of resources, something Rivers Edge is doing, too. They are also contacting customers to make them aware that the cuts will affect them soon.

Everybody involved is hoping Old Man Winter quiets down so the salt coming into West Michigan is enough to get them through.

“It’s supply and demand,” said Richard L. Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a nonprofit trade association. “We’re scrambling. We haven’t heard of any agency that hasn’t been able to keep the roads open or safe, but there’s a lot of anxiety.”

Public works agencies report difficulty in securing re-supply. In response, Zezima says:

Mark Klein, a spokesman for Cargill, which supplies salt to Vermont, said deliveries, which come via train or truck, were hampered by the bad weather. Some towns in the Midwest said they had been told that barges bringing salt to their area were unable to cross the Great Lakes because of ice.

“They’re running down on their stocks early on, and we continue to build supply in,” Mr. Klein said. “It would be nice to get a break in the storms and let the stocks build back up again. In any winter we would be replenishing throughout the winter. But because this winter is more inclement, it’s causing the earlier drawdown of supplies, which no one really forecast.”

In some cases it is not the large storms that are sapping resources, but the many small ones that just coat the road, making them too slick for drivers.

“I think a good 16 to 18 inches is a lot easier to manage than the two-, three-, four-inch storms that come in every 24 hours,” said Bruce Berry, the public works director in Amherst, N.H.

We can all agree: there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Toronto was embarrassed several years ago when it needed to call on Canadian army troops to help overwhelmed local snowfighters. China has mobilized 158,000 Peoples Liberation Army troops (about the number the U.S. has in Iraq), and supplemented those with more than 992,000 police and 303,000 “paramilitary” personnel. In Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, where the accumulated snow reached about 13 inches, the provincial government reports mobilizing a quarter million volunteers to shovel snow.

Yet roadways are reported uncleared. Seven of the eight highways connecting Guangdong and Hunan provinces have been cut off. At least 25 bus passengers were killed when a bus ran off a road “covered with a thick layer of ice and the temperature about minus two degrees Celsius.” About 11,000 vehicles were piled up on the highways in eastern Anhui Province, where half of the state and provincial highways were crippled by the snow. China Daily reports that “more than 8,000 traffic police were dispatched to keep order on the 40-kilometer congested section in Anhui – nearly one policeman for every stranded car! Vegetable prices in cities have more than doubled.

Perhaps the storm clouds will have a silver lining and stimulate improved winter maintenance on Chinese roadways, opening a vast new market in highway deicing salt.

For that reason, a year ago, the MOE concluded, as Environment Canada had in 2001, that government units that put salt on roads are seriously addressing the issue and that enlisting their voluntary support is paying big dividends. It denied an environmental activist petition to jettison the voluntary program and replace it with a system of provincial permits issued to agencies allowing them to salt roadways -- or not, if the province so determined.

Twice examined and rejected, the mandatory permit system was resurrected for a third look in the annual report of the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, a government ombudsman agency. ECO Gord Miller called for "comprehensive, mandatory, province-wide road salt management strategy to ensure aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are protected from chlorides." The premier added vocal support for improved salt management. Environmentalists applauded the report as the foundation for renewed investments in mass transit.

While the Ontario Good Roads Association deserves loud congratulations for its effective leadership in improving salt management, the salt industry has displayed quiet leadership as well. Recognizing that sacrificing safe roadways is politically unpalatable and that the new Road Salt Code of Practice embraces the latest technologies from around the world, the Salt Institute and Environment Ontario initiated an effort to measure the environmental effectiveness of the Code's "best management practices." That research effort has been joined by Environment Canada and will be conducted this winter and next.

The ECO did not participate in the multi-stakeholder group that has studied salt management options extensively. That group labored three years and concluded that the only practical policy requires balancing environmental protection with roadway safety and preserving winter mobility and the jobs and economic health it provides. Poor response to a snowstorm would impose more than $357 million a day in lost wages, retail sales and tax revenues, according to a recent study. Effective roadway maintenance needs to be localized, since citizens will not accept unsafe roads.

By all means, let's heed the ECO's call for a "comprehensive ... province-wide road salt management strategy to ensure aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are protected from chlorides." But let's keep local elected officials accountable both for environmental performance and for keeping roads safe -- a life-saving job for which MOE permit-writers are unprepared and unsuitable. And let's invite the ECO to attend the semi-annual meetings of the road salts multi-stakeholders group to learn of the enthusiasm and commitment of local governments to protect the environment against the dangers in mismanaged road salt.