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The above picture was sent to me by a reader that told me they didn’t even bother dropping the snow gate on his driveway, but did across the street. They also didn’t do a very good job on my driveway, my berm was over a foot high, while my neighbors had less, with longer driveways. I guess the snow plow drivers are determining who gets snow gate service thru the eeny-meeny-miney-mo process. That’s not how we wrote the ballot initiative AND now I am wondering what the consequences if an operator isn’t attempting to do it right? In other cities if the gates are not done right you can call into public works and they will come and clean it for you. There are some factors here to consider, the operators are paid an hourly wage, in other words if they have to slow down a bit, it is not going to affect their workload. Something else I like to remind people that the end of your driveway is OWNED by the city, clearing the streets IMO is no different then taking care of the curb. The Public Works department encourages residents to call them if they missed your driveway, so they can assess the situation.
There has often been an argument from the Public Works department that they really don’t work as well on long driveways and snows over 6 inches, which I find to be misleading.
Just yesterday I witnessed (below graphic) a snowplow operator kind of put that argument to shame. As I was sitting at the light on 49th street waiting to merge onto Western Ave. two snowplows going South on Western passed by. The first one had no snow gate, the second did, and he dropped it across 5 lanes of traffic (hardly slowing down) and I didn’t see any snow come over the snow gate until he was almost all the way across. As we said while doing research on snow gates across the country, they work on long driveways and in deep snow, now if our Public Works department will just choose to use them properly and often.
I’ve witness some of the same. Yesterday I was following a snow plow on Main from the Pavilion heading North. I watched the plow operator neglect to drop the gate for twoish blocks. Once he hit city hall you can bet your pants that gate dropped. As soon as he hit the library the gate went up again and did not get dropped again.
I turned at 6th so no idea how it went after that.
Here’s to hoping the operators are acclimating and they’ll be more efficiently used in the future.
The gates have not yet once worked at my house. I live on a curved street where 3 of our homes have only 10 feet between our driveways. The house 2 to the left has a clean driveway, the house next to the left gets a small amount of spill over and I get the entire load. 30 minutes this morning to remove the hump the plow left. Is there any point complaining. Nope. Just like everything else in this town, some get the benefits but all of us have to pay for it. Shut up and like it.
It’s the learning process for the first full snow season. I have a feeling the plow drivers will work out the kinks. Give them another apprentice year. They’ll make this work.
So I litterally watched the snowplow operator drive by and open and close the gate exactly like they should. I still had a one foot windrow. Now I also have clear the snow in front of my mail box. Seems to be about the same amount of work with or without snow gates.
I also watch 2 different road graders plow my street. every house on the street has an extended driveway (3 car). the snow plow operator would slow down at the start of the drive way. Engage the snow gate and speed up. by the time the snow gate was fully engaged the grader was half way across the drive way and the gate would immediately start lifting up again. so by the time the grader was at the end of the driveway it was fully retracted. I will say for the 1 second it was down and fully engaged the snow gate did work.
I was also in the Testing area for the snow gate and I will say the operators have definitely improved. They use to miss the Curb by 6 to 10 feet. This time they were right on.
My personnel feelings are they need more training and the equipment need some calibration. After watching them plow my neighborhood I am pretty confident all they are doing is hitting a button in the cab that activates the gate. The amount of time the gate is on the ground hasn’t been adjusted correctly for the length of our driveways.
oh well back to shoveling snow!
Should complaints go to Stehly?
I saw a snowplow maintainer driving down Cliff Avenue today around lunchtime (blade was up) texting and driving. So my question is, if the maintainers are so easy to drive that you can text at the same time, I don’t know why they are struggling with the snow gate operation 🙂