Ours an unprepared winter city
I spent the better part of six years of my youth travelling through dozens of countries on four continents, and I can confidently suggest that among the world’s most beautiful spots is Saskatoon in the summer.
The skies are disproportionately blue, and even in periods of drought the South Saskatchewan River allows this city to be an oasis of green. The days are rarely so hot that the nights don’t bring relief.
So beautiful is the city that, in fact, it seems Saskatoon is always taken aback by the return of winter. The city has recently put more effort into budgeting and planning for winter, allocating more money to snow removal, and designing new roads to accommodate higher water tables and the mortar bombardment-like impact of the freeze/thaw cycle.
The recently released City Centre Plan also includes a plethora of ideas to make living with winter and its shoulder seasons not only easier, but actually something to anticipate eagerly.
Yet, for a city that was forged out of the northern prairie more than a hundred years ago, Saskatoon is still unprepared for winter by design, psychologically, and in maintenance. It’s even less prepared for winter’s end.
I was likewise caught by surprise this week when the front tire of my bike caught a patch of ice that had formed where the trail ended at a traffic light. The person who had been clearing the trail over winter had created ridges that effectively made an artificial pond. My tire studs left impotent scratches across the smooth, dark and invisible surface, and the rough ice where I landed left scratches on my knee and up my thigh.
The city has improved its snow clearing of bike and pedestrian trails greatly over the past couple of decades, but there are still systemic problems. The snow is typically plowed into windrows alongside the trails, where they effectively form deep trenches that trap run-off in dips and dangerous turns. There is no effort to address drainage.
Bob Patrick, an urban design professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s geography department, sent me a photo of the deep ice trench that formed on the walkway along the Broadway Bridge. It looks more like a National Geographic photo of a remote retreating glacier than it does a sidewalk expected to be used by hundreds of pedestrians, cyclists and wheelchair users daily.
Patrick is frustrated that the city does so much to clear road surfaces for vehicles, yet so little to accommodate the growing population of elderly and youth who rely on “active” modes of transportation.
Fellow geography professor John Pomeroy takes Patrick’s complaint a step further. He asks: “Why should our streets be so bad that it is a regular occurrence that people cannot drive anything but a high clearance truck down our side streets?”
What must add to Pomeroy’s frustration is that of the 7½-or-so billion people on the planet, there are likely not five who know as much as he does about snow and water, how ice melts, how water in its various forms is impacted by climate change, and how it can be managed. However, the city has yet to seek his advice on things such as where trees are planted, where and how snow is stored, and what design and mitigation strategies could best reduce the harm of winter.
Alan Wallace, a planner at city hall, wonders why more can’t be done to celebrate rather than avoid winter. Included in the city’s downtown plan are such things as heated sidewalks, the need for canopies to cut winds and reduce snow, warmed alleys as people places, and the use of stored snow for recreation.
Steve Lafleur, a policy analyst with the Winnipegbased Frontier Centre for Public Policy, notes that cities all over the world use excess or collected heat to warm sidewalks and control snow. However, Canada seems averse to the idea.
Even during the coldest days of winter, warm water pumped from Saskatoon’s Queen Elizabeth power plant snakes through the icy river, painting the banks with hoar frost. Wallace wonders whether the heat couldn’t be better used to warm downtown sidewalks.
Pomeroy says the cold, winter city of Sapporo, Japan, has crews out almost nightly removing snow to melting facilities to regain the streets for people. Winnipeg and Ottawa build miles of skating surfaces, complete with warm-up shacks and temporary decorations, and Quebec and Nordic countries build ice hotels and play structures.
Saskatoon has ice-littered bike lanes, icy intersections, broken struts and a need to do better. Meanwhile, I have a limp.