Give us a little time to clear streets, city says
Arterial, collector roads are main focus
Big snowbanks on residential streets in the Ottawa core should be cleared in the next couple of weeks, says the city — as long as major storms stay away.
Large snowfalls before and after Christmas along with lighter accumulations here and there have produced larger snowbanks and narrower streets than many residents have seen in recent winters.
What normally are two-way roads have turned into oneway thoroughfares in some areas, and that is prompting calls.
Most of the issues the city is hearing about involve parts of the Glebe and Old Ottawa South, said Kevin Wylie, the city’s manager of roads and traffic operations and maintenance.
Crews should get to those areas by Sunday night as long as there’s no significant snowfall before then, said Wylie, who has travelled through the neighbourhoods and acknowledged “they are getting kind of tight.”
This week, the city has concentrated on clearing accumulated snow from arterial and collector roads that are higher-volume, higher-speed areas that have to be cleaned up first to avoid serious traffic and safety problems, he said.
Crews are also starting to pick away at some of the “problem areas” in residential parts of outlying areas.
Those areas include newer subdivisions with tighter roads in places like Stittsville, Barrhaven and Orléans.
Part of the problem on core streets such as Holmwood Avenue in the Glebe is that people who violate overnight parking bans make it difficult to clear streets properly, Wylie said.
“Some of those snowbanks are quite wide — the width of a car, basically, because we can’t get any closer to the curb,” he said.
The city’s standard is to keep the “travel portion” of a residential street at least five metres wide. When it becomes narrower than that, crews pick up and remove snow along the edges, a slow and expensive process.
Snow that restricts sightlines at intersections and at pedestrian, school and railway crossings is removed within a day of crews learning of the problem, according to the city. If the number of areas needing work is more than the city’s resources can handle, they’re addressed “on a priority basis.”
Snowbanks are also removed or reduced when they start to restrict pedestrian and cycling traffic, or trap water on the road or sidewalk, the city says.
Staff travel through neighbourhoods to look for problems and also take into account reports called into the city’s 311 line, said Wylie.
“In the residential areas, we ask people to be cautious, be a little more patient. Backing out of your driveway you have to be cautious, because there are sightline issues.”
This year has seen a lot of snow in a short period rather than the freezing rain and “freeze-thaw types of events” seen in recent winters, Wylie said. “I think people just probably aren’t quite used to it, but we go by our maintenance quality standards and we’re well within those, so we’re not doing anything differently than we would have done in a previous snow year,” he said.