City wants community input on snow routes
The City of Lethbridge is asking residents who are affected by snow route operations to share their feedback with them through a survey that is now live on their website or by calling 311.
With the warm weather coming to a halt this week and snow making an appearance once again in the forecast, the City wants community feedback about recent snow and ice control changes.
“This last winter season we plowed snow along 80 kilometres of major residential roads and we are asking people to provide the feedback in writing and let us know what they think,” said Juliane Ruck, Transportation Operations manager with the City of Lethbridge, on Monday.
She said the City is hoping to hear from people who live on, commute through or work alongside snow routes. The results of the survey will help them implement changes if necessary.
“We will be presenting all the results to council late in June and then council can direct us to do adjustments or consider changes based on the results of the feedback,” said Ruck.
She added they have already heard about some challenges throughout the season, but they are hoping for more feedback.
“One of the major challenges is windrows along the curb that we create in the plowing operation and especially when we block driveways,” said Ruck.
“So we created this help your neighbour program - ‘mighty neighbours’ - where we encourage people to lookout for each other and help each other.”
She said unfortunately there is not much that can be done about it as some times there are multiple plows driving one after another and the snow needs to be placed somewhere.
Ruck said that during regular events during this winter they heard from only a few people facing challenges, but one snow event at the end of January created a lot of challenges due to strong winds.
When explaining how many residents are directly affected by snow routes Ruch said close to 6,000 residents live along them and many more commute through or work along snow routes, therefore they are hoping to receive a lot of feedback.
“It would be nice if we could get up to 1,000 responses, there is a prize available at the end so we hope that encourages people - you can actually win a ride along a new snow plow,” said Ruck.
Regarding the possibility of declaring snow routes this week, Ruck said residents who are affected by them need to be aware of tickets being issued - real ones this time around.
“I would like to ask everybody to keep in mind that there will be real parking tickets issued now and they are $50, so it is really important that people move their cars,” said Ruck.
She said so far this winter season they have been issues courtesy tickets, but because they have already issued a 1,000 of those, this time around will be different.
“We distributed a lot of courtesy tickets to educate people to follow our messaging and not park along those roads when we declared them, normally we only impact people for a maximum of 48 hours,” said Ruck.
She explained one of the biggest challenges they encounter with parked vehicles is having to manoeuvre the snow plows around them.
“If people want to show up and talk to us in person, we’ll have a snow plow again at the Community Conversations event at the end of April,” said Ruck.
The survey will be open until April 7 and the Community Conversation event will take place at the Enmax Centre on Apr. 25