Haydain Neale, 1970–2009
Transit City and Transit Cities
Peeve Patrol
Newsstand: November 23, 2009
The Making of a Medley
Urbanist is a photo series that will look at developments, architecture, trends and activities happening in various cities––including our own––to inspire the urbane urbanist at home to make Toronto a better place.
Everyone in Eastern Canada noticed that there was a snow storm on Sunday. No doubt, people in many places have had a tough time getting around as a result. Toronto and many other cities talk a good talk about pedestrians being at the top of the list when it comes to the transportation hierarchy. The City's Official Plan, which exists to guide policy and development, clearly puts pedestrians at the top of the list, and at the bottom, the private vehicle. However, when a storm like this hits, it seems that reality doesn't match the rhetoric being offered. Pedestrians are at the bottom, left to wait while the private automobile takes precedent.
Four days after the storm hit, many city sidewalks are only being cleared now. Highways and arterial roads were cleared not long after the storm hit. Residential streets followed a day or so afterwards. Sidewalks that aren't in front of businesses or homes come last, since many have not been cleared yet. It seems that the people running the city forget that at some point, we are all pedestrians, even if it is while we walk to the bus stop, or on our way to our cars. Either way, expect your journey on foot to be a challenge. Urbanist would suggest a protest to change the state of affairs, but with all that snow, who could march without tiring themselves out?
Photo by Erinn Cunningham
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Clearly you have not been in my alleyway, or any downtown victorian row-house alleyway since Sunday... absolute disaster zone for anyone driving anything smaller than a hummer.
Well I don't exactly think it's a surprise, given that the city announced the fact that plowing would be scaled back this year due to the city's lack of cash.
As someone who walks about 5km home every day across the downtown west end, it really hasn't been that bad. I guess it varies across the city though. (Somehow I doubt that the Scarborough 'hood where I grew up has been great for walking.)
But as far as prioritization... however you feel about cars & driving in general (I kinda hate cars myself), the fact is that there would be a lot more chaos if plowing sidewalks took priority over roads.
And let's face it, people who commute by car are probably the heavey-hitters when it comes to the voting, taxpaying public.
To say that the snow out there would discourage a protest march though... that's just sad.
Unplowed streets = death, carnage, tragedy.
Unplowed sidewalks = mild inconvenience.
You got through writing the whole article and this didn't occur to you?
I can't agree with the article more. It seems awfully foolish to clean up the roads with such aplomb and leave us trudging knee deep in slushy snow when we disembark from the sidewalk.
paigesix: the city doesn't plow alleys. Are they even public property?
In addition to the private automobile, there are the public buses and streetcars, police and fire vehicles, ambulances, school buses and shuttles, hospital shuttles, garbage trucks, delivery vehicles, service vehicles, homeless support vehicles etc. All of these benefit the broader public, including those who do not drive.
I very highly recommend Christopher Hume's column in yesterday's Star: "The point, of course, is not that we shouldn't devote tens of millions of dollars plowing highways and roads, but how willingly, unquestioningly, we spend that rarest of government resources, public money, for the exclusive benefit of one segment of the population. This is unfair, unbalanced and undemocratic. Drivers may represent a large, even a very large, segment of society, but there's more to us than that."
Unplowed sidewalks = mild inconvenience.
Sure, x, if you're able-bodied. But if you have a disability that makes walking difficult, or God forbid you rely on a mobility device, then fuck you, you're snowbound today.
...public buses and streetcars, police and fire vehicles, ambulances, school buses and shuttles, hospital shuttles, garbage trucks, delivery vehicles, service vehicles, homeless support vehicles etc...
True, goggles, but if we're clearing snow for their benefit, then we may as well put the highways the lowest on our list of priorities, as how often do these vehicles use those routes?
I fully agree with this article, and part of the frustration with being a pedestrian after a Toronto snowfall is the really irritating single-shovel strip because people can't be assed to actually shovel the sidewalk rather than do the least possible work at clearing their snow.
The night before last, I saw a guy clearing the snow away from his banked-in car—where did the snow get tossed? Not over to another snowbank, but right onto the sidewalk. Why should he care about the sidewalk?! He's drivin'! Jerk.
Laneways are public property and the city does maintain them in other ways, cleaning up leaves in the autumn for example, but they don't plow the snow , when I inquired as to why I was told "because there is nowhere to push the snow to".
I'm all for the city putting a higher priority on sidewalk cleaning but not if they are going to just do more of what they currently do, which is worse than nothing, after the sidewalk plows go thorough my part of riverdale the sidewalks are often no cleaner but the resulting ruts and snowbanks is a real impediment
Why does it have to be one vs the other? They should all be cleaned, for all the reasons stated above.
That includes the highways.
What one says and what one does is usually not one and the same. This is our government after all.
It's not like they clear sidewalks and streets with the same equipment; so why can't they both be running at the same time?
The expense of maintaining the road infrastructure for private vehicles is one of the great whitewashes of our time. Priority is given to ensuring that roads are ready for motorists by dumping of tons of salt which propagates the destruction of the roads it clears and poisons the lake.
The idea that people in cars are somehow 'more important' than others is an outdated notion that should've died with 'See the USA in Your Chevrolet'. We're far beyond 1956, yet the idea of car as king hasn't altered one iota. Neither has the amount of road space increased since perhaps the early 70s. The only increase has been the volume of cars.
'Car culture' at its worst is the epitome of inefficiency when a 2 ton vehicle with a 200 or 300 HP motor is enlisted to move a 180 lb individual from one place to another. Continuing to employ and subsidize 19th century technology as a tranportation solution in a 21st century urban environment is a ham-fisted approach that refuses to recognize evolution. The funding of road infrastructure from general tax revenue without a user fee is akin to total funding through tax dollars of the TTC without charging a fare.
In other words, motorists are getting a free ride at everyone's expense.
@5: Good point on the emergency vehicles.
Not to mention that a drastically inordinate amount of resources are allocated to clear thousands of kilometers of lightly used streets throughout ever-expanding suburbia instead of cleaning out the city core in one efficient swoop.
Ottawa's situation is interesting as well: following a heavy snowfall, the entire street has to be clear for plowing (i.e. no street parking) between the hours of 1 a.m.–7 a.m. If you normally park on the street, you have to find somewhere else to put your car for the night.
@Jonathan: you beat me to the punch. Hume has been bang on about the "tyranny of the automobile" (if you will) in recent columns.
There was a hilarious letter in Thursday's paper, beginning "Christopher Hume's myopic view of the world is symptomatic of the anti-car attitude prevalent in the Toronto Star and at city hall."
In the middle of the night last night, there was a fire alarm at my downtown condo, and the fire trucks couldn't get down my street—not because the street wasn't plowed (it was), but because the gigantic snowbanks and badland-like mounds at the curb (from people shoveling off their cars and the sidewalk) caused people to park too far out into the street.
There is also a point on the same sidewalk where it is currently completely impassible on foot because the snow from the street has been plowed into a huge mound onto the sidewalk by a fence, so pedestrians are walking in the street instead.
So, it's been almost a week and all of the sidewalks in my downtown area are still unattended to, and with the snowbanks blocking sewer grates, crossing the curb threshold practically requires a kayak. What happened to the fleet of dump trucks and brand new melters that are supposed to take this away? Why, more than five days later, do I have to climb over the top of a snowbank to cross a street or get on a streetcar?
I'm normally a pedestrian myself, but I also recognize that emergency vehicles aside, our economy revolves around things that move by road, not by sidewalk. It's not much use to have a quick convenient walk down to the local market when they don't have any food because the trucks couldn't get through. Whether that's a good thing for society is irrelevant; it's just a fact.
thank you patrick metzger. folks who decry the "tryanny of the automobile" often forget our livelihoods (ie. food, medicines) depend on the movement of goods and services. it is important to have the highways cleared when necessary goods which travel out from the city to surrounding areas and vice versa
i believe persons with physical issues can call wheel trans, no?
Every day this week, I've seen a woman pushing a stroller in a lane of traffic on Broadview Ave. I've seen her as far north as Cosburn and as far south as Mortimer, so she's pushing a baby in traffic for at least half a kilometre because the sidewalk along that stretch is virtually impassable unless you happen to be a mountain goat. I don't believe that she'd qualify for Wheel-Trans, and I'd characterize the situation as a little more serious than a "mild inconvenience."
Personally, I think that nothing should be plowed or everything should be plowed. Clearing the snow for people with four wheels at the expense of everyone else's safety is stupid. If you're going to clear the snow, clear it for everyone.
I fully agree that the roads need to be cleared immediately (and anyone who rides surface transit knows what fresh hell comes with every snowstorm), but clearing the sidewalks and enforcing the shoveling rule also needs to be a high priority. I'd even settle for a plan that has the sidewalk ramps, crossings and sewer grates cleared immediately, with the snowbank removal later.
I'm also more irritated at sidewalks that aren't cleared properly by residents, landlords, and business owners. There's a non-resident landlord for a house on my street that never clears the snow, so the span outside the house turns into a treacherous, pitted, ice hazard fused to the sidewalk for the entire winter, but without effective and harsh enforcement of the by-law, there are no consequences. This is the same street that has parking enforcement cops zipping down it every 30-seconds to mill-out tickets to cars.
It's not an intellectual argument of choosing cars over people. Roads are easy and cost-effective to plow, sidewalks are not. It's not like they eschew plowing roads in pedestrian-friendly Europe or something and we should be more like them... (if I'm wrong, please correct me). All northern cities and societies plow roads simply because they can, while remote sidewalks will always come last because people don't carry shovels in their pockets and it is difficult to get teams of workers to clear them. (Sidewalk plows help but are often ineffective.)
If you want to do something about it, put down your mouse and go outside and help the elderly lady down the block with her sidewalk.
Absolutely agree, the sidewalk clearing laws shoudl be enforced vigorously.
Another note about snow clearing in Ottawa:
They get a lot more snow there, so they actually truck it to a big field (at the West of Lebreton Flats) and put it into a huge pile. Because of this the snowbanks are much smaller.
In the springtime, groups of middle-aged nerds go out the the pile of dirt that was once snow to find lost jewellery and coins.
uskyscraper: I don't know how cost-effective plowing the roads is because it requires very expensive equipment and costs the City about $5 million to plow the roads after a big storm.
One thing I also noticed this week was the garbage/recycling issues with the snowbanks. The bins and bags won't be picked up if they are behind the snowbank, so I saw a lot of bins outside restaurants and businesses sitting on the street in the rightmost lane. Again—clearing the sidewalks in the city core needs to be a priority.
I was referring to the cost per square metre to clear roadway vs. sidewalk. In any case, Patrick Metzger points out the macro picture so elegantly that perhaps I'm mistaken and it is a choice after all to clear the roads first (a very practical and necessary choice).
On the question of efficiency, no one can beat New York city. The idea of using your sanitation fleet to clear the city streets by slapping plows onto garbage trucks is sheer genius. You have all these hundreds of heavy tough trucks lying around after a storm unable to collect garbage, so what better use than to use them to grind down the snow and clear the roads? Brings a smile to my face every time I see a garbage plow drive by.
I have tried to look, but haven't been able to find a concrete policy on landlord versus tenant's responsibility for snow removal.
So say a landlord put in a lease that the tenant would do the snow removal, but they don't. The city cracks down on this, but who actually gets in trouble? Because really, the property owner is the one who'll get sued if someone slips on the ice...
and re: Ottawa's "no parking from 1am-7am" policy. I would really like to find out how the logistics of that work... if you have a street permit and no garage, where on EARTH are you supposed to move your car?
Let's deputize postal carriers as city by-law enforcement officers so they can ticket non-sidewalk clearing residents as they go on their route. They're out there anyway, plust they have a vested interest in clean sidewalks.
Paige: I'm a landlord and despite what I put in the lease, I'm ultimately responsible for my property. If I have a provision in the lease, like snow removal, that my tenant is "supposed" to carry out, and s/he doesn't do it, it's still my problem. The rule requires "residents" to clear snow, but it would be the owner who gets fined and has to pay it, and then it would be up to the landlord to hash it out with the tenant.
Here's a map (PDF) of where sidewalks are always plowed, where they're sometimes plowed, and where they aren't plowed.
Marc: Parking enforcement is carried out by a unit of the Toronto Police Service. The snow-clearing bylaw is enforced by the City's infamously inept Municipal Licensing and Standards division.
And, like the signs bylaw, they only enforce snow-clearing on a complaint basis. That is, you have to call or email them a complaint about a specific address or set of addresses in order for them to do anything.
Take a look at how the snow was cleared in the 1940s coutesy of this fantastic newsreel footage. (You have to skip forward to the 5:28 mark.)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=aIxHsWv65vM