City pledges more dependability when clearing snow this season
The city of Montreal says this winter will be better for pedestrians, drivers and even cyclists.
Snow clearing on sidewalks, streets and bike paths will be dependable and predictable, the city said Thursday afternoon.
And for cyclists, a terrible winter last year will be but a distant memory, promises Marc-André Gadoury, the city’s point man for cycling issues. The four-season network of bike paths is now 13 per cent larger, and covers 390 kilometres.
Gadoury said the bike paths on the four-season network, which can be seen on the city’s map of bike paths, will be cleared and plowed as often as the streets they are on.
While it was pointed out that bike paths may need to be plowed more often than the streets, Gadoury said cyclists using the network should not expect bare pavement all the time.
“We were asked for predictability; that’s what we’re improving,” Gadoury said. “Cyclists can expect bikes in the four-season network to have the same level of service as all other road users.”
Last winter, the city’s opposition Projet Montréal criticized the idea of a four-season cycling network, because the city didn’t give the boroughs more money to clear those bike paths. As a result, most bike paths in the Plateau, which has a borough council that is majority Projet Montréal, remained covered in snow for most of the winter.
For cars, the city’s Info-Neige mobile application will now have real-time updates, with a new purple band indicating when a snow removal operation is in progress. The city has equipped snow blowers in 18 out its 19 boroughs (Île-Bizard—Ste-Geneviève has opted out of this service), and its central servers will know when a snow operation has begun on a street, and update that information on the mobile application.
Harout Chitilian, the executive committee vice-president who handles the Smart City file, said the city also digitized its snow dumps and snow chutes, so that every time a truck enters to dump snow, its picture is taken, and the city’s database is updated. The trucks are also weighed before the season, and each time they enter a city snow dump or snow chute.
That way the city will know if a truck enters a snow dump full or empty.
Chitilian said the system improves on the old way of doing things, which just recorded each truck that entered on a piece of paper. He said he didn’t know if it would reduce the city’s overall bill for snow clearing.
“But I can tell you it will greatly improve the efficiency of the billing process,” Chitilian said.
Chitilian said he expects now that the Info-Neige application has been rolled out to nearly the whole city, it will help reduce the overall cost of removal operations. He said last year in Ahuntsic-Cartierville, there were 10 per cent fewer towing operations than usual. He credits the Info-Neige application — which shows which streets have parking restrictions for snow removal operations — for some of those cost savings.