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Last Sunday I was driving on the European route E10 and we had to pass the Bjørnfjell pass at the border between Norway and Sweden. In principle the Bjørnfjell road is open all year, but may be closed due to bad weather, as reported by on the Norwegian side and on the Swedish side. This was the sight at we approached the road:

waiting for the snowplough to pass Bjørnfjell

Now, it looks like the road is closed. However, the Norwegian road authority in this case chooses a hybrid between closing and opening the road, a hybrid that does not exist in Sweden: kolonnekjøring or organised convoy driving. In a nutshell, this means that the snowplough drives back and forth over the part of the road that may be closed, and the cars drive slowly in a convoy behind the snowplough. As soon as the last car has passed, the road is closed again, until the next round (I think there is a car from the traffic agency following the last car for safety reasons). See also this youtube clip.

For most roads this occurs as necessary and there is no exact timetable. In Finnmark, however, convoy driving happens according to a timetable per road, a timetable that is adapted to times for ferries, schools, church services, etc.

Does such scheduled or unscheduled convoy driving, as a compromise between closing a road due to bad weather or keeping it open, exist anywhere outside Norway?

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closed as off topic by Mark Mayo, Ankur Banerjee Apr 6 '13 at 20:20


Well, only a fool would pass a snowplow, so it's very common in Canada to see a long line of cars following a snowplow. Waiting somewhere for a snowplow to lead you along a highway, that's a different story. – Kate Gregory Mar 30 '13 at 12:34
@KateGregory Yes, it's the latter I'm talking about. We were around 30 cars behind the snowplough, and I was among the last. By the time we were driving there were already significant drifts, so someone coming 5 minutes later would have simply gotten stuck. – gerrit Mar 30 '13 at 16:21
While I couldn't find anywhere else where this happens (Yay Norway! Haha), I found this from Massachusetts which is almost equally cool: – DarkLightA Mar 31 '13 at 22:52
Closing this because this sounds like a polling question without an actual travel specific component about any particular country. Interesting trivia though! – Ankur Banerjee Apr 6 '13 at 20:21

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