Culture
Zen and the Art of Snow Plow Maintenance
When it comes to allocating resources to remove snow, cities can often only guess and hope for the best
Earlier this month, we posed a simple question to about two-dozen cities of varying sizes and climates: How many snowplows do you have? Pretty straight-forward question, we figured. We expected – naively, it now turns out – that cities would get back to us with a single number. Almost none of them did.
Spokane, Wash., responded that they have 33 plow trucks, 10 graders, five de-icers, 11 de-icer/plows and seven sander/plows. Minneapolis has 43 trucks with front and underbody plows and material spreaders, which are different from the 18 trucks they have with front plows only, their 12 front loaders with plows, and their nine motor graders (which is to say nothing of the 20 front loaders the city uses just for alleys).