VANCOUVER - Don't hold your breath waiting for the city to clear side streets of snow. Pray for rain instead.
Setting the city up for efficient side-street plowing would be done at great expense and inconvenience to residents, says Murray Wightman, City of Vancouver's manager of street operations.
And given the narrowness of side streets, it's hardly possible, he said.
“The bottom line on the residential streets is I’ve got no place to move the snow to.”
Half the street would have to be closed for parking – an expensive task — and more trucks would have to be bought, at a cost of $250,000 each.
“People say, ‘buy more trucks’. I don’t normally like to use the word ‘higher taxes’ but this would come at a horrendous expense cost to the public.”
Wightman said his branch has 47 trucks, and by the end of 2009, he expects to have five more in the stable, fitted with plows and salters, ready for 2010 Olympics venue routes.
Meanwhile, Wightman's looking forward to a different kind of precipitation so the City can start to recover from the recent snowstorms.
“I’ve been doing a rain dance for a week now,” he said.
Wightman said he hopes to be able to put minor street construction on hold, and employ extra staff from other branches, like sewers and sanitations, to clear drain catch basins and intersection wheelchair ramps.
“The entire operations crew will be dealing with the weather conditions out there. All our labouring workforce will be on the streets.”
If this was said by a kid or something, then I'm OK with it. Politician is worse than a kid
Can't they have more flexibility? Small side streets use smaller trucks idiots and don't need to spent 250k on a new truck. An SUV/pickup/whatever mounted with a big shovel in the front will do the job easily! How hard is that??? And the cost? 50k each max.
發表於 2008-12-29 13:21
| 
yeah! My snow tires are happy to play in this condition. 
