Leaf Peeping Fallout: When Leaves Fall Down, Skids Come Around

A few years ago, the National Safety Council and the American Automobile Association conducted studies that indicated that wet, falling leaves were slippery and sudden, unpredictable at best and tough to spot.

In the years since, cars and their technology have changed. But nature is still nature and takes a lot longer to change. Cars still can't make up for the many roadblocks that nature puts ahead of us as we head through fall and into winter.

Days Growing Shorter and Colder

If there's one thing that safety experts have noted time after time, it is that fall is a rather big wrench for most drivers. It's the time of year when we move from the late warm long days of late summer and early fall to the short, frigid days of winter with their snow and ice. All of this happens in less than three months (sometimes even more quickly -- for example, the earliest recorded blizzard that this author has driven through is Oct. 11, 1967 when Boston was tied up like a knotted shoelace).

Both the National Safety Council and AAA have continually pointed out the need for vigilance as the days grow shorter and the year heads toward winter. This is why they both commissioned their studies.

Both studies agreed that there is a fundamental problem with wet leafs -- drivers never take them seriously. They seem to think that they can blow through an area of fallen wet leafs without slowing down an iota.

That this also happens as the days are growing shorter (even with extended daylight savings, night still falls earlier) and the ground getting colder as is the air just adds to the problem. And, if the year has been a particularly good year for Leaf Peeping because of a large mantle of leaves still on trees, then drivers are in for a particularly rough ride.

Pour Oil on Road and Hit Your Brakes

It's at this time of year that you really need to slow down and drive defensively, not aggressively. If you drive aggressively, you might as well just lay down a huge oil slick in the middle of a road, speed up and then hit your brakes. Your chances of stopping safely are about as good.

With fallen leafs there's a good reason for this, both groups found. If you look at any pile of leafs you will see that it consists of layers. There's a layer nearest the roadway and then there's another on top of that and so on and so on.

What happens as the fall heads toward winter is that the leaf piles continue to build up in this manner so that you are facing a problem that is continuing. And, when you add the fact that this is the time of the year when it tends to get wet in the northern tier of states and it tends to stay wet for days at a time, then you have a real problem brewing. The leafs never have a chance to dry out and each layer becomes wetter and wetter.

Indeed, the layer nearest the ground never really dries out so what that if you are driving particularly aggressively one afternoon and hit your brakes hard at a four-way intersection with lots of leaf buildup, you immediately have a problem.

The top layers of leafs may respond to your tires and tread, but the bottomost layers never act as if your car is not even there so that when you hit the brakes hard the bottom layers tend to slide across one another and even if the very top layer is relatively dry, the bottom layers will put you into a skid that may send you shooting across the intersection and into another car or a trees or oncoming traffic.

Just Like A Patch of Black Ice

This is why it's just like hitting a patch of black ice at night or early in the morning. The road surface looks okay, but it actually is as slippery as a coating of oil and even with all of the technology that today's cars contain -- anti-lock braking, skid control, traction control and the like -- the inevitable will happen, hopefully ending in nothing more than an embarrassing spinout, but more likely to end up in an accident.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has also studied the problem and has come up with similar findings and has broadened them with a reminder that as we enter the winter months not only do the days get very short with early sunsets and that means that your vision is cut, as well, putting more pressure on you -- even high-intensity lamps can't distinguish if a pile of leafs is wet at the bottom.

A final factor is that with the cold setting in the bottom layer of leafs also tend to freeze up and continue to cause as much havoc as black ice.

The moral to this situation, all the safety organizations agree, is to slow down, allow more time to get where you are going and, if you do not have to be on the road, stay put.