The priority in which streets are plowed and windrows cleared is something set over time, according to city staff, but that's not good enough for a resident who worries about potential accidents.
Mike Bonneau said the city is setting up a dangerous situation along Queensway Street with the piles standing where drivers make a left-hand turn onto Moyie Street.
"You can't see anything when there's a two-foot-high snow berm or even a one-foot-high snow berm... until you're right in the line of fire of traffic in the oncoming lane," he said. "You're sitting there, hoping to God that when you stick your nose out it's not getting clipped off."
"Unfortunately, we can't haul it away as fast as we can grade it," said city streets operations supervisor Mick Jones. "The downtown is our number one priority for snow removal to be graded, picked up and removed. We do have centre windrows on a number of streets that we do get to when time permits."
While Queensway is of a higher priority than residential streets, it still falls below other main arterial routes such as Fifth, 10th and 15th Avenues, Ospika and Tabor Boulevards and University Way, Jones explained.
Bonneau said he has called the city multiple times to complain, but keeps getting brushed aside. He said the windrows were cleared within a couple of days after complaints he lodged last year.
"What's a couple of days when someone's trying to get across the road and gets smacked up," he said. "If they just dealt with it the first time the right way, they wouldn't have to go back and fix it."
Instead of piling the snow in the centre of the road, like it is done around the rest of the city, Bonneau suggested the city push the snow in that particular location to the eastbound side of Queensway where there are no houses, only trees.
"What's the point of leaving it in the middle in a hazardous spot like that?" he asked.
But Jones said city crews don't adjust plowing to push snow into vacant land.
"Then we're going to be all over the map, it just doesn't work," he said. "We need to be consistent when we're doing plowing."
However, allowances can be made for areas which are technically a lower priority in terms of plowing, but have a higher risk factor.
Jones said he hadn't previously received any complaints about this particular spot and that he was willing to take a look at it. The fact that westbound traffic is coming up a hill could also be a factor in the decreased visibility, he added.
