Winnipeggers must clear their own windrows, city says
Having city crews clean the snow ridges would vastly increase costs to taxpayers
Keep those shovels ready this winter if you want to get past the windrows in your back alley, because the City of Winnipeg isn't going to clear them away.
During last year's heavily snow-laden winter, plows left behind hard-packed piles of snow and ice over a metre high in some back lanes.
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Following a number of complaints from residents, city administration looked into options for clearing away the alley mountains.
The city has some 885 kilometres of back lanes and the current cost to clean them is about $250 per kilometre. The options it considered would either double that or soar the cost to $6,500 per kilometre.
"Due to a large amount of snow and drifting snow, the amount of back lane clearing during the 2013-2014 winter was approximately 79 per cent more than is undertaken in a typical year," the report states.
"As the winter progressed, the amount of storage available to residents became constrained and as a consequence, many chose to push the windrows out into the back lanes. The quantity of snow from residents
shedding windrows in this manner combined with new accumulations meant that subsequent plowing
operations created unusually high and often extremely dense windrows."
The city already provides one of the top snow and ice control programs in the country, providing services not offered in other cities such as clearing of front-drive windrows and plowing of sidewalks, said Brad Sacher, Winnipeg's director of public works.
But the alleys are "generally lined with various structures such as garages and fences, thereby limiting the room for equipment to manoeuvre," the report states.
The city's current practice for back lane clearing is to do a single pass with a large front end loader. That reduces the probability of damage to private property during a clearing operation, the report states.
Administrators looked into the viability of using smaller equipment to remove windrows but that would "take a protracted amount of time to complete" and more than double the current cost.
Another option is to use snow-blowing equipment and semi-trucks to haul the material away. The process would take much longer than the current method and increase the cost to $6,500 per kilometre from $250 per kilometre.
The city would also need to buy more specialized equipment and it would take several years to get a return on the investment, the report states.
While it is not recommending any change to the policies, the city's administration will continue to seek out and participate in the research of innovative methods for removing windrows as new technologies develop in the future.