After roughly 8 feet of snow in three weeks, mammoth snowbanks everywhere and a problem-plagued public transit system, many Bostonians are thinking there's got to be a better way to deal with snow.
In Montreal, which has been pounded by about 8 feet of snow this winter, once precipitation starts, crews go to work, spreading salt on sidewalks and streets. Once the snow reaches an inch, the city deploys 1,000 pieces of equipment manned by as many workers to begin clearing both sidewalks and streets.
"Our citizens don't have to shovel sidewalks," in contrast to Boston, Jacques Lacavallee, a city spokesman, said.
By the time the snow reaches 6 inches, Montreal deploys 2,200 pieces of equipment and 3,000 workers.
"It's literally an army that takes over the city," Lacavallee said. "This is part of our daily life, unlike you guys, who have been caught by surprise."
Small plows tackle the sidewalks, while two trucks working side by side clear the roads. One is essentially a huge blower that eats up the snow and then spits it out through a tube on top into an adjacent dump truck.
The trucks carts the snow away to one of 12 city-owned lots, or to one of 16 chutes connected to a water- treatment unit, where salt, dirt and other impurities are removed.
The end result? Fresh water.
Unlike Boston's 118-year-old subway system — America's oldest — Montreal's is only 49 years old and, as far as Lacavallee can remember, has shut down only once — in 1972.
Bonnie McGilpin, a spokeswoman for Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, said the mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics has reached out to companies and professors from local universities, searching for innovative ways to deal with the record snow.
"One thing to keep in mind about Montreal," McGilpin said, is that its snow removal budget is $153 million, or 3.2 percent of its total budget, whereas Boston's is $18.5 million, or 0.7 percent of total spending.
Boston's streets also are not wide enough to accommodate the kind of large snowblowers and dump trucks that make their way, side by side, down Montreal's roads, she said.
Boston's Public Works Department uses more than 600 pieces of equipment during the height of storms to clear the streets. The snow is then brought to as many as 10 snow farms throughout the city, McGilpin said.
Since the first winter storm at the end of January, McGilpin said, the department has removed nearly 22,000 truckloads of snow, plowed 287,743 miles of roadway, put down more than 76,152 tons of salt and plowed for 180,314 hours.
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