Month: January 2019

I’ve been meaning to post a link to the video Sharon Roseman and I made about sidewalk snow clearing. Most of the filming was done in 2014, just before the KPMG Review of Winter Maintenance Services in St. John’s, so the film turned out to be kind of a benchmark for what things were like before the city started implementing the recommendations of the review. It also documents the activism that led to the review. Here it is:

Honk If You Want Me Off the Road from Elizabeth Yeoman on Vimeo.

And here are a few of the review recommendations, mainly the ones relating to pedestrian needs, and my brief comments (in blue) on how they’ve been implemented since the review:

-Sidewalk service levels should be improved by starting earlier and focusing on high priority sidewalks.

(Much of the recent $150,000 increase in the snowclearing budget was to allow for an earlier start to sidewalk clearing. Snow removal crews are also working seven days a week instead of five. My own experience is that this is happening after lighter snowfalls but not so much after heavier ones, when drivers of motor vehicles are still given priority over pedestrians. We need much more discussion of what the word “priority” means.)

-Snow removal should start earlier during snowfalls to improve sidewalk and road conditions, using privately hired equipment (trucks and loaders) to expand capacity during major events.

(This year an additional 11 km of sidewalk snow clearing is being done by sub-contractors, which is intended to help city staff get the rest cleared sooner.)

-Seasonal workers should be engaged for a longer season (18 or 19 weeks, instead of 16 weeks) to provide resources for early or late storms; the city should also allow more time for training early in the season.

(If this has been done, I haven’t seen it published anywhere.)

-The training program should be expanded, focusing on improving effectiveness, reducing equipment damage and improving supervisory skills with three new seasonal trainer positions.

(I haven’t seen any information published on this either. What I have seen is a lot of “duelling plows,” as Sonja Boon calls them, where the street plow drivers plow the sidewalks back in after the sidewalk plow drivers have been through. Surely this could be avoided with better training.)

-A revised protocol for handling 311 calls on snow issues should be developed and external communications improved.

There’s a new app that allows people to report in detail on snow issues. You can also still call or email them. Anecdotally, I’ve heard that response is good and that has been my experience. But should we really have to be contacting the city as often as we do just to be able to get around safely?

-Plan for a new snow dumping site besides in St. John’s harbour, to minimize traffic congestion and for environmental reasons.

This has not been done as has recently been highlighted in the media.

I only know what I’ve read in the media or experienced myself so it would be great to hear from others. Do you have information I am missing? And what have your experiences been like as you move around the city?

And I Walked
Sonja Boon

Winters in St. John’s are hard. It’s a truism that almost doesn’t need to be spoken. After all, the weather sucks. The shoveling—especially the end of driveway—seems to go on and on. And honestly, who wants to be shoveling in May when the rest of the country is cavorting in the sun, and has been for months?

But that’s not the main reason why I find St. John’s winters hard.

There are extreme winters in other parts of Canada (hello, Winnipeg). There’s lots of shoveling in other parts of the country (hello, Ontario). And honestly, while other parts of Canada are cavorting in late April, we get them back in November when they’re buried under a foot of snow and we’re cavorting.

Winters in St. John’s are hard on my mental health.

And they’re hard on my mental health because I spend too many months feeling trapped. I can’t get out in winter. I can’t move properly. I can’t walk to the store. Or to the library. Or even to work. Because I can’t count on there being a sidewalk, let alone a safe sidewalk, to use. When I go out, I hunch myself in, holding myself tight. I don’t breathe freely. All of my energy goes to making sure that my body is safe, that I don’t accidentally end up on the road, or with a broken leg, or….

Winter in St. John’s is bad for my mental health and it has nothing at all to do with the weather. Or the shoveling. Or our late spring. Rather, it has everything to do with the city’s lack of interest in pedestrians.

And I’m an able-bodied person. What must winter be like for people with disabilities. Or mobility issues. Or with strollers?

This week, I’ve been in Halifax for research. I’d never visited Halifax in winter before, so I didn’t know what to expect. What I found were wide, salted sidewalks. Everywhere. Even the HarbourWalk was salted.

Halifax HarbourWalk at 9 am. Just a hint of snow overnight and they’d already salted the whole boardwalk. There were joggers out. And people walking dogs. And others, like me, just feeling the air.

And so I walked. And I walked. And then I walked some more. On the first day, I walked for over two hours straight. Just because I could. It was gorgeous weather: sunny and just below zero.

It was -8 the second day, close to -20 with the wind chill. But still I walked. And I walked. And I walked some more. Another two hours. Just because I could.

Look at the lovely sidewalks on Spring Garden Road! Loads of pedestrians, too, although I tried not to take photos of them.

I walked to feel the air. I walked to breathe. I walked to feel my body moving. I walked for the sheer pleasure of moving my body freely in the winter. I walked because I didn’t have to hunch myself over, picking through the ice and snow. I walked because I could hold my head high, because I could turn my attention away from fear and toward feeling the air against my skin, my feet moving confidently, one in front of the other. I walked because I could. Because I didn’t have to worry that I would end up upside down somewhere.

Look at the beautifully cleared and ice-free open space in front of the library – safe for wheelchairs and strollers and anyone who wants to go the library.

I realized, sometime during that second day, that I hadn’t felt this free in winter in years. Eleven years, to be exact, since our first winter in St. John’s.

It was ….
Wonderful. Exhilarating. Liberating.
It was incredible.

But it couldn’t be normal, right?

It must have been an easy winter.
It must be better weather in Halifax.

Where you can’t walk in Halifax: The Public Gardens are a skating rink right now, and their existence shows what happens when a city doesn’t keep up with the regular salting and clearing. They’re also closed to the public right now, which is probably wise.

What was Halifax’s secret?

I asked a friend, a Haligonian from birth who has spent the last four years living in St. John’s. Two weeks ago, she returned to Halifax to work on her thesis proposal over the winter term. I figured that if anyone would know the scoop, she would.

“So, what’s the deal? Is it always like this, every winter? Or is this just a weird winter?”

“It’s always like this,” she said. “And after four years in St. John’s, I’d totally forgotten. It’s amazing.”

She told me that she’d been raving about it to friends, other Haligonians she’s known for decades.

“I keep commenting on it and they just don’t get it, because it’s normal….”

Let’s just pause right there.

Because. It’s. Normal.

Nothing else. There is no magic.

Just…because it’s normal.

And so it should be in St. John’s.

A couple of guest posts have come in. This is the first, from Jackie Evans in St. John’s. It’s a story without words so you can draw your own conclusions. Stay tuned for the next one, by Sonja Boon reporting from Halifax!

I’m planning to have a series under this title. This one will just be a short post to note this excellent article hot off the online press with an overview of issues and approaches in several US cities, “Why Cities, Not Individuals, Should Clear Snow From Sidewalks,” by Kathi Valeii from CityLab (Jan. 11, 2019). With thanks to David Brake of the Essential Transit Association.

The 2014 consultation on snow clearing in St. John’s used several other cities for comparison: Mount Pearl, Fredericton, Halifax, Québec City and Saguenay. It’s hard to find a good comparison for St. John’s because it really is unique. But the authors believed that these cities together represented most of the challenges St. John’s faces: hills, buildings directly on the street, old infrastructure, heavy snowfall. A key finding was that St. John’s actually had a higher standard of street clearing than other cities but a lower standard of sidewalk clearing. In other words, drivers were more of a priority here than in other cities and pedestrians less of a priority. I’m not sure if that’s still true or not because there have been major improvements in St. John’s sidewalk clearing since the consultation and the election of a new mayor and council who are much more supportive of active transit and accessibility. What I am sure of is that we still have a long way to go here in St. John’s before we can say that pedestrians are a priority.

In an earlier post, I compared St. John’s to Moncton — very different cities but two things they have in common are a somewhat similar size and a similar amount of snowfall. On average, St. John’s receives 335 cm of snow each year  and Moncton 311. Moncton cut its sidewalk clearing budget in 2015. But what’s interesting is to compare the attitudes in Moncton and here. The cuts in Moncton led to only one side of some residential streets being cleared instead of both sides and this was considered to put children at risk when walking to school because they would have to cross the street. Here, most residential streets still have no sidewalks at all and even major streets may have only one side cleared, or none. Last year, Moncton bought two new sidewalk plows to help bring service back to former levels. City Councillor Bryan Butler said in support of improved sidewalk clearing, “‘When you turn on your tap, you expect water. When you put your garbage out, you expect it to be picked up. When you go to walk on your sidewalk, you expect it to be plowed and your streets plowed, you know.”

Would anybody in St. John’s say “When you walk on your sidewalk, you expect it to be plowed?”

 

I got a lot of response to a tweeted link to a video about a program in Bologna, Italy that rewards people for using active transit.

My fellow campaigner for accessibility and active transit, Sonja Boon, sent a thought-provoking response: She says she is “not a fan of ‘good behaviour’ rewards because what constitutes good behaviour? And what if you can’t access any ‘good behaviour’? Build a good system, shift focus away from cars, and people will come. The Dutch, for example, got their enviable network of cycle paths because of deliberate political decisions. The infrastructure was central. St. John’s has a series of fantastic walking trails because of similar deliberate decisions. It could make similar choices today.”

I agree, absolutely. Infrastructure and political decision making are central. Funnily enough, the article in which I read about the rewards program also made this exact point. The author, Sandy James, says that Britain’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has drafted guidelines that prioritize pedestrians, cyclists and transit over cars. Britain’s Department for Transport says in response to NICE that its own guidelines are also “crystal clear that street design should explicitly consider pedestrians and cyclists first”. James contrasts these policies with Vancouver, where there is no pedestrian plan. That made me wonder what we have here in St. John’s so I looked it up.

St. John’s Transportation plan actually has quite a lot about pedestrians, for example: “…creating walkable streets … and ensuring that neighbourhoods are connected to these areas by the network of local streets, sidewalks, pathways and trails.” It also talks about increasing mobility options, community building and place making. And they’re working on a new cycling plan. It even has a very sweet ad.

I didn’t find a lot of details on the Transportation Plan though so I’ll look into it and write another post later. Publicly espousing these values is already a good start. Anything that gets positive attention for accessibility and active transit can contribute to building a culture that sees pedestrians as having the same rights of access as vehicles (or perhaps even greater rights, as proposed in Britain — after all, they are helping to lower health care costs and reduce pollution, traffic congestion and parking problems). That might include rewards and cute ads. But, far more importantly, it includes the decisions and the infrastructure that make it all possible.

 

 

The morning after the snowfall on the week-end the sidewalks in my neighbourhood were cleared! Not only that but I heard from a couple of people in other neighbourhoods that theirs were too. Councillor Ian Froude explained last fall that one of the priorities for the additional $150,000 for snow clearing in the new budget was making sidewalk clearing more efficient and it looks as though it’s happening. We still have a lot of work ahead to make our city truly accessible to everyone year round but this really is good news. Happy new year!