For the rest of the year, whenever snow removal takes place in Montreal, the fine people in my neighbourhood of NDG (Notre-Dames-De-Grace) will whine about Walkley. This is not the complaints of yesteryear, if anything we’ve come quite a long way. Now, the residents are mad that the Walkley bike path gets cleared before sidewalks.
This has happened twice now. It’s going to keep happening. However Neal M. asked me if I felt Walkley should be plowed at least once before 10:00 AM. This got me thinking, should it really?
About a year ago a YouTuber made a video covering the amazing feat of snow removal in our city. My first reaction to Neal’s question was, do people know how complex snow removal is?
A very basic breakdown of snow removal
The second you see snow on the ground you see the big plows on the main roads. They are on it from the beginning of the storm, clearing those major arteries as the folks call them. Then the process gets more focused on removal.
Check out this phenomenal reddit post that has a video showcasing the whole snow removal process at a street level.
The mid-sized road plow clears all the snow the side of the street into the middle. Then from the middle over to the other side.
The snowblower crunches it up and sends it into a wave of trucks.
Then the sidewalk one pushes snow into the street, clearing the sidewalk
Then another kind of plow takes the sidewalk snow and shoves it back into the middle of the street. Then from the middle, to the other side.
The snowblower and truck team gets rid of that snow line.
The snow gets dumped in a snow dump.
All of a sudden parking becomes safe again. No longer will I hear the sounds of tires spinning on Fielding (the literal soundtrack to me writing this).
The question is, where does a city start. Believe it or not the order for the city (Described in several sources but here’s one) is as follows:
Very narrow streets - Picture the ridiculously small roads in the old port. In case of an emergency, vehicles need to be able to cross these roads. They are actually the top priority.
Main Roads - These are the streets where you find hospitals, metro entrances and bus stations.
Medium-Sized “Collector” Roads - These are places where you find stuff like residences for the elderly, schools and Wiki says they are roads that connect neighbourhoods.
Residential streets like Walkley - I mean yeah, last on the list.
When you think about the elder person's mobility issues, it actually does seem like “Collector” roads are a higher priority than Walkley. My grandpa (RIP) lived in one of those apartment buildings for older folk, that street would have been managed before a regular degular house-filled street.
It’s not just bureaucrats that create waste
Turns out that one of the big time wasters is the people who forget to move their car. It takes about 10 minutes for them to get a car towed. That’s a lot of lost time. Apparently we see over 30000 cars getting towed a season. Since it’s illegal to make the alarm sound at night, there isn’t much city workers can do but tow the cars.
The city put a lot of effort into creating the app and website to make snow removal operations transparent. You can even see when it’s safe to park again on the street, there’s a “cleared” status. This is very helpful when you get home at 3:30 AM.
The snow removal process is a majestic and complex beast of wonder and probable bureaucratic bloat. On the one hand, we are the world champions of snow removal from the limited internet research I’ve done. On the other other hand (corruption joke), we’re spoiled.
While Ubering folk around I learned that in Quebec City you have to just park at a mall parking lot somewhere when your street needs to be ploughed. We at least have parking options as they go through each side of the street. A lot of the people out there real mad, probably haven’t actually looked into the detailed wonder that is snow removal.
It’s a precise process meant to cost as little as possible. As an example, if they rush to clean a sidewalk, they may have to spend millions extra a year because it’s less efficient. The people would just then rah rah about how snow removal cost more. They wouldn’t even appreciate the plow that passed early on that sidewalk, especially as their housing taxes went up more.
Okay, we know why you are really here.
But the bike paths got cleaned first
The bike paths use a different machine. For all the folk going on about contracts, it does make sense that a different machine needs a different contract. The article I linked was bragging on how cool and cutting edge the technology is.
Are y’all ready to reinvest an insane amount of taxpayer money into rolling out those newfangled machines at the scale required to clear the sidewalks? The machines are pretty awesome. They chop the ice up like a snowblower does then spray them with a liquid salt solution to send the icy snow mess to its doom.
The amount of bicycle infrastructure that needs to be covered in NDG is astronomically smaller. So yes, the supercharged snow removal wonder blitzes through on the bike path. However it’s not designed to do sidewalks. They’d need to make a sidewalk sized one to do sidewalks.
Great, the mystery is now solved. Montreal is a leading technological innovator in snow-removal tech, but it’s not scaled up to the metropolis sized city we live in.
Anyway, this information was available fast. I researched this blog in like 45 minutes. But the discourse in our local neighbourhood Facebook group is a bunch of grownups in their feelings who want what they want. They, for the most part, do not care how and why the process works as it does.
Moral of the story is, the logistics of snow removal are cool.
Live long and Prosper Everyone