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Parking ban over Friday night, first-time residential blading endeavour a success: city

Edmonton, parking ban, winter, snow clearing

As crews cleared snow from the last of Edmonton's neighbourhoods on Friday, the man in charge of such operations declared the city's first-ever residential parking ban a success.

"This was kind of a taste of one end of the spectrum – [blading] right down to bare pavement – but we're going to be taking all of this information back and looking at it and looking at all levels of service in residential areas," Edmonton's general supervisor of infrastructure operations Andrew Grant told media on Friday.

It was expected by that evening, all residential blading would be complete.

The Phase 2 parking ban – which had been in place since Dec. 20, save for a period of extreme weather during the holidays – will end at 7 p.m.

The 2021-22 season was the first time the city implemented its phased parking ban system, prohibiting residents from parking vehicles on streets so crews had space to blade them down to bare pavement. On average, the city says a community was under a parking ban for 72 hours.

It is estimated crews cleared between four and five thousand kilometres of residential roadways in 375 communities, a level of service that hasn't been provided in many years, Grant said.

The work took four weeks and was completed on budget, he added.

Of course, it didn't go perfectly, with weather and a number of other variables forcing schedule changes.

"It's a big moving operation. There's a lot of variables that can contribute to why those areas have been rescheduled, anything from equipment breakdowns to available staffing resources," Grant commented. "We're still in a pandemic. We have a large operating team, therefore there's impacts to our teams and staffing levels at times."

However, the biggest challenge proved to be parking ban compliance. According to Grant, more than 1,700 tickets were issued to drivers who left their vehicles in crews' way.

He believes better communication would address the issue: "Educating citizens on what it is we do, where we do it, and how we do it, is a huge piece of this."

His teams also tested for the first time removing windrows from a neighbourhood, choosing Griesbach for its variety of types of roads.

They found it "comparable" with the work to remove windrows from Edmonton's high-speed and high-volume roads, except manuevering the tighter areas, but overall "successful."

Grant wouldn't specify what recommendations he planned to make to city council in the spring. 

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