Co-operation will reduce snow-removal headache

I've been driving in Edmonton for almost 30 years -- and I can't remember the roads ever being this bad, for this long. The ruts that grab your tires and send you in directions you never intended to go. The slippery snowpack, icy enough to send you skating right through the intersection. The bumps that send your brain joggling in your skull. The windrows and snowdrifts waiting to trap and hold the unwary.

The LRT has been plagued by snow-related delays. Snow and ice have clogged and short-circuited the line's switching systems. And when it's windy, fine blowing snow can blow up into the traction motors on older-model LRT cars, causing the motors to short out.

"It only takes one car to mess everything up," says Patricia Dickson, who speaks for Edmonton Transit. "It's a domino effect. When you have one issue with one car on one line, it screws up the whole system."

Dickson says at least 20 buses have got stuck too -- caught in windrows or wedged in snow-narrowed streets, hemmed in by parked cars.

Is this your winter of discontent? I can't say as I blame you. The lack of municipal capacity to deal with this mess isn't improving anyone's mood.

Bob Dunford, the city's director of roadway maintenance, has certainly been hearing our complaints. But he says the city simply doesn't have enough snowplows or graders or staff to deal with what he calls a "once-in-20-years" storm.

Indeed, he says, it would be fiscally irresponsible to keep enough equipment and people on standby to cope with the unusually heavy snowfall.

"Even if this were a fairly normal, average winter, we'd be lean."

The city owns just 20 graders, 33 snowplows, 12 giant snowblowers and 111 sander-plow units.

Right now, it also has between 100 and 120 privately owned contract graders on the road to cope with the mess. In all, Dunford estimates there are about 500 city staff and 200 private contractors working full out to get the streets cleared.

"We're like a small army," Dunford says -- then adds ruefully -- "A very small army."

On Wednesday, the city finally announced plans to start plowing Edmonton's residential roads and side streets 24 hours a day. The emergency procedures will be in place at least until month's end.

While crews have been working on the major arterial roads around the clock, they've only been clearing residential streets between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. In this kind of situation, when many side streets are all but impassable, why wouldn't you have crews working around the clock?

In the first place, Dunford says, it's harder to plow streets in the evening when people are more likely to have vehicles parked in front of their houses. And while people may not like snow and ruts, apparently, they don't like being awakened by the noise of graders or that annoying "beep-beep-beep" sound the machines make when they back up.

"People don't want the trucks in their neighbourhood at night. We always get complaints about that, too," he says. "People expect quiet."

Nonetheless, the city has now decided it's better to disturb our beauty sleep than to leave our streets unbladed. Dunford says the timing is urgent -- because with warmer weather in the forecast, the rutting is about to get even worse.

"We're scrambling to get things back under control," he says "We need to go to the extreme. We don't have a choice. We'll put up with the complaints of the noise if we have to, to get it done."

The bigger challenge, he says, is that so many Edmontonians habitually park their cars on the street, even in bus lanes, making it next to impossible for plows and graders to do their work. That's a habit, he says, that city drivers have to break -- but selling that idea to Edmontonians, he says, will be hard.

"Parking bans are common in Canadian cities during winter season, but not in Edmonton," he says. "There is a dependence on street parking. It's been allowed and condoned over many years, and it's difficult to change that culture quickly."

So exactly how grumpy are we all entitled to be? And who are we allowed to blame for our collective misery? No wonder drivers, pedestrians and transit users are all frustrated. Nothing is working properly, it takes long, uncomfortable hours to make trips that usually take minutes and the risks to public safety are real. It's maddening that we're using LRT cars so old that blowing snow can short-out their motors, maddening that it's taken a week and a half for the city to move into high gear to plow the side streets. But this has been no ordinary January. If we don't want to pay taxes to keep top-of-the-line snow removal equipment on standby, if we won't even get our parked cars off the street so the plows can do their work, then there's only so much whining we're entitled to do.

Meanwhile, Dunford says he doesn't want to think about how much it's costing to handle this year's giant snowfall. "We're not even focusing on what the dollars are at the moment. My first concern is getting the snow done. And the end of January, ask me how much I spent. Then, I'll be able to tell you."

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