City operations superintendent Bill Gaal's comments (Jan. 16, "Snow removal expectations too high") imply that most of the complaints about snow removal in Prince George are from unreasonable individuals who expect the snow to be cleared from their streets immediately.
"Over the years, some residents have come to expect immediate relief after a snow fall... It is not economically feasible to have all situations cleared the first day of a snow fall... The calls were from all areas of the city, and the common theme was 'their street needed to be cleared first.'"
As a resident of a neighbourhood with extremely poor snow clearing (the Crescents), I resent this implication. There is a lot of room between "expecting my street to be cleared the first day of a heavy snowfall" and "expecting that the snow would be cleared from my street before it melted and re-froze into deep ruts that are still there a month later." For example, my individual street was not ploughed or graded for 26 days, within which period there were at least two heavy snowfalls. The neighbourhood streets have been allowed to remain in poor shape for so many weeks that even after ploughing and grading, the surfaces are still hazardously slippery and rutted.
The article states that "While the goal is to take an average of five days to clear a 15-cm snowfall from the city's 1,485 lane kilometres of roads and to open 20,000 driveway entrances, the Dec. 10 to 12 snowfall took eight-and-a-half days." If indeed my neighbourhood streets had been cleared within eight-and-a-half days after each snowfall, they would not be nearly as unsafe as they currently are.
I implore the city to reexamine their approach to snow removal - it's clearly not working, and it's too simplistic to blame problems on unreasonable resident expectations.
Melinda Worfolk
Prince George
