Parking ticket season opens
Parking rules change April 1st on many streets as the city switches to summer mode.
The city is doing its spring cleaning now. A couple of nights ago I heard a ferocious noise right outside my place: it was a massive, noisy vacuum vehicle cleaning the sidewalk, sucking up all the gravel left behind by winter.
My landlords just came by to take up the winter coco matting stuff from the front steps, and one of them asked me if I knew what the city does with all the gravel that gets left behind by winter. It’s dirty stuff but it’s still gravel and would still function in that way if reused, but wouldn’t it clog the machines that spread it around in the first place?
carswell 23:51 on 2024-04-01 Permalink
Vague, half-awake memories of an early-morning interview — probably on Daybreak — with a city official who claimed the abrasive was so contaminated with street pollution that it couldn’t be reused without extensive cleaning, the high financial and environmental cost and complicated logistics of which ruled out any practical reuse scenario.
Joey 09:06 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
While in the past the city has been tolerant of people forgetting to move their cars soon after April 1, I noticed an entire block’s worth of cars tickets yesterday – no-parking was in effect from 8-9 am, despite it being a holiday. Guess money is tight at city hall…
Kate 11:35 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
carswell, nice to know someone else was wondering the same thing. The city must remove tons of that pointy little gravel mixed with all kinds of other crap, every spring, but I wonder where they put it.
carswell 11:49 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
The city official — it may have been Philippe Sabourin — mentioned how the gravel was handled (disposed of IIRC) and noted that a lot of it ends up in the sewer system but I can’t recall the details, assuming I was still conscious when he got around to them. I’ll check later today to see if the interview has been archived or was turned into an website article.
carswell 12:14 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
Didn’t find the CBC interview but Sabourin has apparently been doing the rounds.
“About one-third of the city’s gravel, which is purchased at a cost of $30 a tonne from local suppliers, ends up in the city’s sewage system, where it travels to Montreal’s massive wastewater treatment system in the far east end of the city. It settles to the bottom of swimming-pool sized containment reservoirs, where it is collected, then dumped into landfills.
“The other two-thirds is picked up during street cleaning operations and dumped into landfills as well. Since it is contaminated with salt residue, chemicals, contaminants like motor oil and numerous cigarette butts, the gravel cannot be reused, Sabourin said.”
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/montreal-crews-get-busy-removing-a-winters-worth-of-grime
Kate 13:11 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
Thank you, carswell!
MarcG 16:43 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
The unimaginable volumes of waste produced by this society…
carswell 16:49 on 2024-04-02 Permalink
@MarcG Indeed. What gets me is this stuff is too contaminated to reuse on the sidewalks and streets next winter but not too contaminated to put in a landfill site, where many of the contaminants can leach into the ground and ground water for decades to come.