Disclaimer: I feel sufficiently authorized to write this post because my entire life thus far has been on a slow trajectory northward: beginning in California, to Ohio, to Wisconsin, and most recently to Montréal.  For the record, I do not anticipate a subsequent removal to Nunavut.

Montreal receives, on average, twice the amount of snow each winter that Madison does, but I wasn’t prepared for how much  more seriously this city takes its snowfall.  Wisconsonites are inveterately opposed to yielding any ground to winter whatsoever, and so they parade around through the snow in Birkenstocks and sweatshirts, obstinately insisting that they do not feel cold, because cold is for the weak.  In Montreal, however, people actually wear winter coats, and apartments come equipped with high-lipped rubber shoe mats and external lockers to accommodate sodden winter shoes.  Even my ever-so-fashionable neighbors have swapped their fur-lined snakeskin pointy-toe boots for fur-lined and fur-covered shaggy moccasin boots.  Here, winter is dealt with realistically, and with panache.

But the snow removal.  The well-engineered city snow-removal system goes far beyond anything I’ve ever imagined.  It is epic.

As the city’s déneigement portal will tell you, it snows more in Montreal than it does in Oslo or Moscow, and we have our own Bureau-Stratégie-Neige to oversee the process.  And it is hardcore.  Obviously, there is a lot of snow to take care of, but also–as a city crammed with cars, narrow streets, sidewalks, and little to no front lawns to speak of–it can’t just be plowed off to the sides of the roads, as there’s simply no room.  For this reason, the city uses a veritable armada of farm equipment, construction machinery, and semis (or, as the city puts it, “spreading trucks, tracked vehicles, snowblowers, tractor-loaders, graders, dump trucks”).  We’re not talking dinky snowplows; in Montreal, we’ve got John Deeres.

And here’s the thing–as I mentioned, there’s no room for the snow to be plowed and piled up, so the snow that is removed from the streets needs to be hauled off.  Hence, the take-no-prisoners snow-removal machine.  Immediately following a large snowfall, orange signs are posed on one side of the street, warning residents to move to the other side for a designated 12 hour period.  In Madison, alternate-side snow emergency parking was notorious for being both a pain, and not punishing those who chose not to follow it.  But in Montreal, if your car is not moved from the forbidden side of the road, the snow crew will stop next to it and blast a characteristic siren for about a minute or so, which is specially designed to send lax car owners dashing out into the street to move their vehicles.  If the siren doesn’t work, you’ll be towed–either to a city lot, or just somewhere around the corner.  Both amusing and effective!

Sidewalks are cleared by a vicious and fast-moving fleet of city mini-plows which, according to my source, actually kill three to five people each year (mostly, I’m told, people too drunk to avoid the zippy mini-plows of pedestrian doom).  Which, wrongly, I intially found very funny, for the same reason that I find David Sedaris’ “Six to Eight Black Men” funny, as if there’s a particular quota to be met.  We’ll see who’s laughing in January when I have to make a headfirst life-or-death dive into a six-foot-high icy snowbank.

And then the John Deere and Terex equipment comes out, as you can see here.  Or here:

See the little sidewalk plow? Zippy!

Then comes the Mondo Snowblower, followed by the Dump Truck Army:

It is of note, however, that as I spent 40 minutes on Tuesday night waiting for my normally every-five-minutes bus on a major road in the center of town, that I saw nary a plow clearing the road. But four cyclists. Even today, you can still hear the merry sound of spinning tires as people try and force their way out of snow-logged parking spots, and the slow cruncha-cruncha-cruncha of scrapers on windshields.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 2:36 pm and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.