The timing of Wednesday's snow storm is the reason it took until Friday to clear downtown parking spaces of snow, says Charlottetown's manager of public works.

About 20 cm of snow came down Wednesday night, ending at about 3 a.m. Thursday. That timing meant, even with a recently extended parking ban, there was no way to avoid the reduced number of downtown parking Thursday, said public works manager Scott Adams.

"We have to hire private contractors to truck all the snow. We don't have the trucks to haul the snow away. So because the snowstorm didn't stop early enough for us to arrange and co-ordinate all those trucks there is no way we could have started hauling Wednesday into Thursday morning," he said.

"The snow didn't stop until about 2, 3 o'clock, which is hard to predict. So you don't want to have all these trucks lined up, ready to go, and, oh, we're still plowing snow. Because our guys that plow the streets during snowstorms are also the crew that does the cleanup after the storm."

Adams said they actually did the cleanup more quickly than usual, getting all the metered spaces cleared in two nights rather than three.