Snow Clearing

I don’t know how snow clearing works where you live, but here in Calgary, it is as if what roads are to be cleared are being decided by some descendant of Paul the world cup octopus oracle - it's random and without purpose.

This is decidedly a local rant, in fact maybe even neighbourhood based, but the approach the city has clearly doesn’t work.

Friday morning we had the snowfall warning - 25 cm over two days, not much by Eastern terms, but big for Calgary exacerbated by the fact that the major snowfalls usually follow a very mild period and are accompanied by cratering temperatures. This means the first snow hits, the temp drops, it freezes and ice, ice and more ice. Snow started on Friday aft.

Sure enough, I woke up on Saturday morning to a fresh skiff of 6 inches of white stuff.

During the course of Saturday morning I shuttled the girls around to dance and other stuff and I saw not a single snow plow. Unlike Montreal where I grew up, homeowners in Calgary are responsible for shoveling their sidewalks. I personally think if the citizens of Calgary can be responsible enough to have already shovelled and cleared a majority of their walks by noon on Saturday, surely the City public works can get their heads out of their collective asses long enough to run a plow down the major road near our neighbourhood - which only connects the only two north-south roads to speak of in town.

Ironically the salt and sand truck apparently passed by - over the unplowed major thoroughfare - how in the h*** is that supposed to be effective?

I am told that the City of Calgary actually has less plows now than it did 20 years ago when the city was half the size and two thirds the population. How does that math even work?

This is more than an annoyance – this is dangerous. The City is putting its citizens in jeopardy by not doing this right. I am outraged with every snowfall but nothing ever gets done. Most people just shrug it off and say that “the city is saving money by just waiting for a chinook” which is a nice laissez-faire way of saying that expectations are so low that people have resigned themselves to a possible early death from some yahoo spinning out in front of them.

We claim to be a world class city, but when you look at the delivery of some pretty basic services, we are definitely bush league. Grr.

Dear City of Calgary - snow plows, graders, snow blowers, dump trucks. Is it too much to ask?

Oh yeah - they call it snow removal here... Note to civil servants, if you call it removal, please remove it.