We’re always looking to improve our performance in winter and continue to test new tires as they come onto the market to see if we can improve bus traction in difficult conditions.

Coast Mountain Bus Company‘s Maintenance Engineering team recently took advantage of the last bit of snow before it melted away for spring to perform snow traction testing of a new all-weather tire on Mount Seymour. The team will test the tire in other conditions throughout the rest of the year during the other seasons.

Video Transcript

Right now, we are at the top of beautiful Mount Seymour on a snowy day in early March. Today, we’re testing two different tire types from the same company, two different tread patterns and rubber compounds.

We’re basically trying to simulate a load on the bus to stop it from moving forward and then we’re driving the bus on a on a snow-packed surface. We’re trying to measure the difference in traction between the two tire types.

The setup we’ve got today is the weather conditions are perfect. It’s kind of just around freezing level. We’ve got a nice runway of about 50 metres of somewhat compacted snow. It’s pretty wet, so it’s pretty similar to what we’d be seeing in Vancouver.

We’ve got one of our 40-foot buses and then we’ve got a service truck that we’re pulling behind the bus. We’re able to adjust how much brake we’re applying on the service truck and that way we can kind of simulate different levels of resistance against the bus. And then we’re just comparing how effective the tires are at getting traction in the snow.

Our current tires — it’s a winter-rated tire, so it carries the Three-Peak Mountain Snowflake rating. The tire that we’re testing today also has the Three-Peak Mountain Snowflake rating, but it does have a bit more aggressive of a tread.

Part of the test is really to just constantly evaluate and look for ways to improve our service, improve the performance of the buses, improve the reliability. And that way we can offer as good a service as we possibly can.

Thank you to Mount Seymour for lending us their space to do the testing.