City seeks solutions for intractable ice
Snow removal is done by the boroughs, but ice is tackled by the city, which is having chronic problems. As anyone with even a small walk or steps knows, timing is everything with ice: if it’s going to be above zero for a couple of hours, that’s when you deal with it, not after the temperature settles down to –10° for a few days and creates a bumpy rink for you to get past every day.
Valérie Plante is right in that climate change will be giving us more ice than snow and we have to learn to deal with it. Maybe the city should put up a tasty prize for engineering students for the creation of a new technology for this purpose. Heat beams, I’m telling you.
Note the Gazette’s bitchy little Plante wants answers (again) headline. That the technology doesn’t exist for dealing with it in most usual conditions is irrelevant to them: Plante should just snap her fingers, should she?
Steve Q 10:19 on 2019-01-08 Permalink
Heated sidewalk would have been a good start. Not on all street, of course, but Ste-Catherine, S-Denis, St-Laurent and other streets with high pedestrian traffic. She should have at least tried it
Kate 11:28 on 2019-01-08 Permalink
Well… they did try having heated steps at Place Vauquelin and it didn’t work. I’m not convinced that technology is ready for the kind of workout it would get on busy pedestrian streets.
Tim F 21:14 on 2019-01-08 Permalink
In a fever dream a few years ago I imagined a system where hot air was pumped from the metro through tubes in the concrete of sidewalk, melting snow and ice while cooling the metro air. A kinda geothermal thing.
Say, do we have any engineering students who read this blog? You’re welcome to the idea!