During the fall of 2008, the state Department of Transportation put a coating on Route 422 eastbound at the bridge crossing over Lake Arthur, one mile from Interstate 79. The experiment was applied from the bridge to Prospect, ruling out any special application.

This is called a "shot-and-chip" coating because it is fine chips tarred to the road. This is done on the side roads in townships.

But this time it was done on a four-lane highway on the right lane only as a trial effort to keep vehicles from sliding off the roadway when it snows and becomes slippery.

Now, it worked well in some spots. Some places for a hundred yards, it stuck to the road well.

Other places, the chips came loose and the road is smooth like the other surface.

Obviously, there were variations in the application of these chips applied to lessen vehicles' sliding when the rest of the highway is slippery. That's evident because some of it worked well while, on other sections of the highway, it didn't work very well.

You would think the guy with the white hard hat would have been taking notes on the variations of the application and then some improvements would have been made the following year. But in the fall of 2009 there was no application of any kind. Nothing was done.

Let's hope the PennDOT trucks with their chips, tar and big rollers come back in the fall of 2010 to reapply a similar treatment.