What happened to those lazy, mild winters Toronto used to get? Not that cold, with so little white sky-poop that the city’s snow clearing response teams sat around with little to do. For two or three years following 1999’s Mel-brings-in-the-Army storm, the city sat as if stunned, until we started getting the kind of winters not seen since I was a kid. Roads lay under snow for days, complaints rolled in to the city and the media jumped all over municipal staff. Readers wrote in about post-amalgamation snafus such as plows lifting their blades mid-street, just because they passed over a boundary between two cities that no longer exist.

 I haven’t been all across town, but from what I can see, the roads have been looking pretty good this year. Last week I checked in with a tired-sounding Gary Welsh, Toronto's so-called snow czar, after yet another dump of the white stuff. Asked how has this winter been going, Welsh says, “actually things have gone quite well.” It seems that city staff spent a lot of  time planning their snow response, re-jigging routes so that more kilometers of pavement become clean faster. “I think the planning has paid off,” he says, pointing to the guidelines set down by city council where snow crews must clean all streets within a set time limit. Council’s dictates take into account the amount of solid precipitation that has to be moved, but generally local side streets have to be plowed within 14 to 16 hours after a “normal snowstorm.”  In one particular late-January blizzard, crews were allotted between 24 and 36 hours to get the majority of plowing done. Welsh says that many streets received not one but two visits from plows within 24 hours.

 Another performance measure is complaints, which the transportation manager says are “significantly down” from previous years. “We’ve been getting a lot of favourable comments from media and residents saying that they've noticed an improvement in the level of service this year.”

 Being in the thankless profession of popping bubbles, I had some complaints for the czar. On behalf of older folks and those trying to push strollers down sidewalks, I pointed out that homeowners in the older parts of the city don’t seem to be nicely clearing their ice as they used to. Welsh says that a city by-law still states that “where the city does not provide a snow clearing service, the adjacent residents must clear the sidewalk within 12 hours of the completion of a snowfall.” Perhaps it is amalgamation-borne resentment, or the fact that the city barely enforces this rule, but the collective act of voluntary clearing sidewalks seems to have collapsed in many parts of the old city. He says the municipality clears 6,000 of  7,100 kilometers of sidewalks and “residents are only responsible for clearing 1,100 kilometers. Generally we would be plowing sidewalks within 24 hours after the end of a snowfall.”

 What if they don’t? Says Welsh, “We request residents do not phone us early in our snow plowing operations because we can’t get to all the 9,500 streets right away.” He asks citizens “to wait about 15 hours, when we should be wrapping up our operations.” After that time, let ‘em have it via 416-338-9999. The city can use the information to locate holes in the snow-clearing net.

On one night recently there were a lot of stalled removal teams on some main streets I travelled, with dump trucks waiting around for snow-blowers to snort up long lines of piled snow. Welsh says that the blowers break down often, often after chewing up something they shouldn’t have. Over the years, he says, the machines have mistakenly tried to mince motorcycles, bicycles, hockey sticks and other junk hidden in snow mounds.

He was surprised to hear about some arterial roads where orange no-parking signs are stuck in snowbanks in anticipation of one of the blow-and-dump treatments. The signs can loiter for days, effectively banning parking yet eroding drivers’ belief that the city has its act together. Welsh says that if the snow is not gone on the same day the signs are placed, report it.

 Ed Drass, National Post

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© Ed Drass 2008