It’s so fucking stupid. Snow removal responsibilities basically go along with property. Municipal streets are either done by the city or it just decides “nah” and doesn’t do it, sidewalks and bike paths are for the residents (sometimes done by a service if it’s a rental building or the owner resident springs for it). Except on city property, where sidewalk and bikepath clearing is, again, the cities responsibility.
Then there’s county roads, often they go through the municipality and as such latter won’t do it unless getting reimbursed by the county. Then there’s state roads, same deal, then there’s federal roads who as far as I’m aware just do it themselves mostly, allthough could contract it out, but otherwise same deal as they tend to cross both counties and municipalities.
Then there’s train property like crossings, which is the train companies responsibility, and like bus stops, which falls on the bus company and if you have it, tramways and tramstops, that also have to be done by the operating company. Again, unless there’s some contract and reimbursement shit going on.
Love to send out like 30 different groups of snow clearing people in a wild mishmash of priorities that leaves a checkerboard of ice patches in the public space
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It’s a logistical nightmare for the city to mobilise for a snowstorm. At least here, the workers are only with the city because they give a shit about the social utility of the work. If they worked the same storm in the private sector, they’d make 2-3x as much. 5-10x as much if they owned a pickup truck. They’re usually getting the muster call at midnight to wake up at 2 AM for a 4 AM report time, then only getting 6 hours of normal-rate work at best. Almost all of them are seasonal workers who otherwise don’t get any hours between September and March, making less than they could in fast food without benefits. This season, despite having full availability on the muster sheet and being required to answer the call no matter when under threat of losing that job, there have only been two snow storms and I haven’t been called in for either.
We could and do outsource parts of that work to contractors. They do a terrible job because they care about profit instead of social utility, frequently damaging stuff that we then have to repair because the contractors to do that cost way more too. All of those workers are making $30-50/hour to do a worse job than the municipal workers do for $17.50/hour. They’re taking our jobs and we’re empowering them over the winter to do more in the spring, where more is poisoning our water supply and air to give rich assholes green lawns and increase our rent. Reinforcing those contracts only offloads more work to the private sector with direct consequences for everything that touches.
The mixed responsibility means they can’t do anything more than patchwork clearing of the spaces that need to be safe by the time people wake up. If they assume control of the non-municipal spaces that time instead of waiting 24 hours to fine the HOA/landlord or let the feds/county/state use their budgets for that, it’s instantly expected to the same standard next time. All of that falls on the backs of the skeleton crew the city can convince to work for half the pay and no health insurance beyond workman’s comp at the city-run clinic.
There’s no way in hell I’d do it unless I was a communist doing what I’d do for free under communism and clearing the routes that I use to make them safe for my neighbours.
Snow is something that makes a very good case for the opportunity cost of taking up space in an urban setting.
100 people living in an apartment building that takes up 1 unit of area? You need to clear X units of sidewalk. 100 people living in ranch-style houses that take up 5 units of area? You need to clear 5X units of sidewalk plus a bunch extra for everyone’s front walkway.
It’s the same thing with salting the roads, and also road maintenance, utility lines, and so on. Taking up space that a bunch of people go past means you lengthen everybody else’s commute by that much, you pose an obstacle to their movement by that much. If you live alone on an urban lot that could otherwise comfortably house 10 people, you are taking up 10 personal shares of resources.
We could build cities in such a density that the services per citizen are so low that it’s a negligible fraction of the workforce. But noooooo, we “don’t want to live stacked on top of each other”, so we compete to drive up the prices of upkeep and then offload it reactively, through market forces, onto whoever’s on the other side.
Green is net resource benefit, red is net resource burden.
