Ottawa's snowplow priorities unfair to bus riders, group says
Last Updated: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 | 4:21 AM ET
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Ottawa's practice of clearing roads first and sidewalks later is the opposite of how things should be done, says an Ottawa environmental group.
"If the city is putting clearing bus stops at the bottom of their list, in terms of priorities, that's reflective of a broader problem that we have in Ottawa right now," said Graham Saul, a spokesman for Ecology Ottawa.
The city seems to be putting car drivers ahead of public transit users by clearing snow off the streets quickly while bus riders are forced to wade through snowy sidewalks, then clamber over hefty berms of plowed snow to board and get off the bus, he said.
"When you have a major snowstorm, one of the things you're presumably trying to do is keep as many cars off the road as possible so you can clear it," he said Tuesday. "So the more people that are getting on the public transport system, the better off we are."
In order to do that, he said, the city should make public transit easily accessible by clearing snow from the transitway, bus routes and bus shelters first.
John Manconi, head of surface operations, said the city plans to have most sidewalks and bus stops clear on Wednesday, three days after Sunday's storm dumped 37 centimetres of snow on the city.
Manconi added that bus stops are more difficult to clear than streets because the snow must actually be hauled away rather than plowed to the side.
Otherwise, he said, "it just creeps out into the travelled portion."
Coun. Clive Doucet said that in order to clear the city's 6,000 bus stops, the plows would have to stop at each site, and that would slow down the entire clearing process.
He added that buses themselves need to have the streets open first, before they can run.
"Functionality, I think, is what drives the delay in opening up the bus stops," he said. "Can we fix that? I think we can look towards giving it a better priority somehow, but at the end of the day, Mother Nature's got a bigger broom than we have."
City crews will be hauling the snow off the city's streets and sidewalks for the rest of the week.
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