Waterloo ups snow-clearing efforts ahead of Winter 2024

The City of Waterloo is taking extra steps to help kids get to school and adults get to work after a winter storm.

Waterloo council has voted unanimously to increase snow-clearing service levels, beginning in the Fall of 2024 and focusing on certain high-priority, high-use areas.

“So things like the walking trails for kids getting to school, at the intersections when the windrows are backed up once the plow’s gone by and you’ve got extra snow there, and then around the bus stations so people can get on and off the bus easily,” said Sarah Hanmer, Councillor, Waterloo Ward 1.

“Those are some of the aspects of things that are coming in for the beginning part of it,” Hanmer added. “It then takes a look at other areas of the city to see what might be possible.”

That includes adding roughly 30 kilometres of curb-facing sidewalk to the city workload in 2025, followed by another 25 kilometres of sidewalk maintenance on regional roads in 2026.

“It’s not a full solution to have 100 per cent of the sidewalks within the city plowed, but it looks at what I call our ‘trigger point’ areas where we need to provide some assistance to enable everyone to get around our city as they need to,” Hanmer said.

For the snow-clearing alone, the city estimates the expanded service levels will cost around $1.2 million per year, which also represents about a one per cent budgetary bump to be phased-in over three years and includes costs associated with added more staff and more equipment.

The city has also said it expects the changes could help reduce overall completion times from around 72 hours, to 48.

“[That] is a huge increase in the service levels residents can expect in our city and I think we are progressing in the right direction,” said Hanmer, once again adding, however, that direction does not include the city taking on a responsibility for all sidewalk snow-clearing.

“I’m not sure that we’ll get to 100 per cent clearing, which is what some of the people who came to council wanted to see, but I think this is a step in the direction of making sure that people who need to get around can get around in the areas that are ‘more common’.”