Staples: Just grin, bear it

This is Edmonton, not Phoenix, so deal with icy, snowy roads How much happier would Edmontonians be in winter if the city plowed all the streets to pavement?

This question was put out on Twitter by prominent energy economist Andrew Leach of the University of Alberta last week. Leach moved to Edmonton in 2006.

“When I first moved here, I had no idea why people told me that you ‘need a truck for the winter.’ Not needed in Ottawa or Montreal,” Leach said. “Worse, I’ve got inches of ground clearance, and I scraped through my alley this morning.”

It’s good to have a sharp mind and a set of fresh eyes looking at what we’ve long endured, our snow-packed streets. Of course, Leach is not alone in questioning practices this winter. With its mega snowfalls and cycles of freezing and thawing, the winter has made our residential streets unusually treacherous.

This past weekend, my back alley was like a mountain range of snow, with peaks of ice and valleys of soft mush, all of it threatening to swallow up my car to its axles.

In fact, it was hard to drive on any icy, rutted residential streets. But Bob Dunford, the city’s road maintenance manager, cautions about making too much of our recent problems.

“We have to be cautious, to keep in mind that this was a year of extremes ... You would break down with just about any system with what happened this year,” he said

Of course, even if change to our snow removal system is needed, we need more specifics about the cost and nature of a new plan.

The essential problem is what to do with all the snow.

You can scrape roads clean and haul away the snow to dumps, as happens in Sherwood Park, but that greatly inflates your costs.

You can leave the snow on the roads, but they become rutted quagmires during a thaw.

You can blade the roads clean and push the snow into windrows at the curb, but that takes up residential parking spots.

Edmonton’s current plan is a compromise. We leave five centimetres of snow on residential streets, hoping that won’t create a quagmire when a melt comes, while keeping the windrows small enough that people might be able to park. When the snowpack gets to more than five cm, it’s bladed back to that level.

But this plan is broken, says Coun. Ben Henderson. “We’re spending a lot of money not actually solving the problem ... We’ve ended up trying to make everybody happy and we’re making everybody miserable.”

So what to do? In 2010, when the city last investigated all options, it put forth a plan where twice a year it would blade to pavement and clear out all residential neighbourhoods.

The snow would first be pushed to windrows, taking 10 days.

The windrows would be removed once per winter, 75 days for the entire process.

It was estimated the plan would cost $104 million upfront, almost all of that spent on acquiring news now dump sites, with an annual additional cost of $25 million for the extra plowing, removing, hauling and new site operations.

Based on the 2010 plan, it looks like we would have to increase our annual $53 million snow budget by $30 million to $40 million each year. Ouch! But what if we plowed to pavement twice a year and just left the snow in windrows? The 2010 report said it would cost an additional $8 million per year to do that.

Now I can’t speak to your happiness, but to answer Leach’s question, my own happiness would best be served if we didn’t do anything differently. I’m from the grin-and-bear-it school, the faction that held sway for decades in Edmonton, where we would only ever plow streets on an emergency basis.

That said, I wouldn’t complain if council spent the extra money to store the snow on streets in windrows. Of course, I don’t often use the street in front of my house to park.

If you do use that parking, would you be willing to give it up so snow can be piled there?

Or do you want to lobby the rest of us to go whole hog for the most expensive option, to move that windrow snow once per year to snow dumps?

I’d rather that $30 million to $40 million per year be spent on LRT or on new rec centres, or to have no tax increase at all.

It’s a cold, snowy place. I expect Edmonton roads, not roads like this is Phoenix.