Joe in Cincinatti mentioned they use beet juice because they can’t afford pickle juice. I’ve heard people here in Nashville who know folks in DOT say that beet juice is mixed with salt brine to make it stick to the pavement better and not get blown away as dust when the brine drys. FWIW

Less gov’t is always good! More biz for surgeons and tow trucks! Let’em crash! The market will take care of it!

Maybe they could use Boehner’s or Beck’s tears! They’re super salty, abundant, replenishable, and available on cue!

I predict that preapplication will lead to lots of cracked sidewalks and streets a few years down the road.

I think one of you NJ folks will soon figure out that salt on roads eventually pollutes streams, will definitely cause roads to deteriorate and when pushed to the sides of the road with the snow creates SALT LICKS for deer along the road shoulders. Ever wonder why deer are so close to roads. After deer become habituated to passing cars they get hit trying to cross the road. Salt is a very, very, expensive way to keep our roads safe. Plow and sand.

Use Obama’s hot air, that is the only way he can help us

In Cincinnati we’re so cash strapped we can’t even afford pickle juice.

We’re using BEET JUICE–you can’t make this stuff up!!!!

(no truth to the rumor that if you say ‘beetjuice, beetjuice,beetjuice that Michael Keaton appears)

Why is Bergen cash-strapped? Are not the PRNJ taxes among the highest in the nation?

Just drive a tank truck down to the Jersey shore, load up with seawater and spray that.

some of you have some really terrible math skills

this is the best article I have read in a really long time. All you readers are stuck in a snow storm, with nothing to do……so you are spending HOURS trying to figure out the cost of a ton of pickle juice relative to the cost of a ton of salt. Priceless. It could be a MasterCard commercial. I just love it. Thinking outside the box….. places like Lake Tahoe in California get like 180″ of snow a year…..ever thought of asking them how they clear their streets? Just askin.

Let’s see … compare 7 cents a gallon to $63 a ton … hm … hm hm hm … what an odd comparison, it must be one of those weird East Coast things, like snow. Shall I try to figure it out or shall I look for Carlos’s number? Yeah, I need Carlos, my palm trees have got to be trimmed soon, I realized that as I worked from home today. What a day it was again, sitting with the computer on my terrace, and when my eyes got tired, gazing out onto San Diego Bay as it bustled with boats small and big in the perfect California sun … Now let’s see, seven gallons of snow is equal to 63 cents of brine, or no, wait … O here it is, Carlos, 619…

Obama’s love for the downtrodden heats up the planet’s atmosphere by 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit, while his loathing of George W. Bush cools it down by the same amount. That’s why the scientists have been unable to detect any significant variations in average global temperatures.

I just hope this Global Warming ends before we all freeze to death.

Let’s see…

$7/Gal vs $63/ton. Well let’s assume that the ‘juice’ is slightly heavier than water – we’ll pretend it’s roughly 9 pounds/gallon.

2000 lbs / 9 lbs/gal = 222 Gallons. So for a ton of the juice it costs $1556. Makes the salt seem as a pretty good deal. The juice would have to spread 25x the area with the same melting effect to be more cost effective than salt. And no, I’m not a salt peddler, just a humble systems engineer.

The second comparison is $3 mil for Bergen County, which is 234 Sq. Miles in land area (I don’t care enough about this to find out how many miles of roads there are so area will have to do) is $12,820/sq. mile vs. $20 mil for the state of New Jersey, which is 7422 sq. miles of land, or $2695/sq. mile, So New Jersey’s expenses are less than 22% per square mile of Bergen County’s expenses.

Sounds like Governer Christie is doing his job and someone on the Bergen County board has a brother-in-law in the brine business.

I’m waiting for someone to be allergic to pickle juice , fall down and sue the city.

You all come to AZ. Got good jobs available down here Tucson way, no snow, and not too many people. Going to be 70 tomorrow and the rest of the week.

Think I’ll go for a swim when I get home from work tomorrw and a round of golf this weekend.

Ummmmm …

Salt brine made from sodium chloride contains 2.28# of salt per gallon of water when you make a brine with the appropriate concentration of 23.3%. At 23% concentration, sodium chloride brine has a eutectic freeze point of -6 degrees F. If a typical solid salt application is say 400 # per lane mile (12′ x 5280′) then solid salt would cover 5 lane miles per ton. If one can plow effectively and apply say 50 gallons per lane mile to eliminate any remaining snow then you have only applied around 115 pounds of salt per lane mile.

The real costs of road salt are not in the actual salt itself but in the damage it does in the form of premature depreciation of infrastructure investment. If your state uses 2 million tons per year at $63.00 per ton you spend $126,000,000 per year on salt. Then if you consider a conservative hidden cost of $200 then you add another $400,000,000 to your cost to apply that salt.

Does the including use of salt brine in your winter maintenance program make sense now?

Lol just out of curiosity, I know there is salt in this Brine Mixture, but am I the only one sees something wrong with tempatures below 32 degrees and putting water down on the roads lol

Why not just have everyone urinate on the sidewalks, they do it in the urban areas already…..

Bad judgment..brine has been used for years…write a good story..then you will win an award like they promised you in college.

Why not just use urine … I mean it’s already Jersey.

Isn’t all of hits Algore’s fault? According to his line of BS it should be 70 F in the northeast in the winter time by now.

you dont mix it it comesfrom a brime well, salt water you get when you drill a well. we also mix it with sand here in northern mich.

How many gallons of brine make a ton?