February 4, 2011
Chicago News Department
Cleaning Up the Snow
Chicago got hit by a pretty big snowstorm this week. I suppose I'd know just how big if I'd been paying attention to the news, but those people drive me crazy. What are they calling it? "Snowmaggedon"? "Snowpocalypse"? "Snowlocaust"?
Bah.
Look, it's not that this wasn't a big snowstorm. It was huge. It's got to be one of the 4 or 5 heaviest snowfalls in the past 50 years. I'm not pretending it wasn't much worse than usual. But this is Chicago.
It's not that we're too tough to notice the snow. But we've seen snow before, and we know how to handle it. We're prepared. We've got brushes and scrapers and de-icing spray for the cars. We've got shovels and road salt and snow blowers. There're a couple of thousand guys with pickup trucks and jeeps who attach a plow blade and make a little extra money clearing parking lots and driveways. There's a guy on my block who owns a small construction company; he brought a Bobcat loader home with him to clean out the alley behind his house.
The condo association where I live changed plow services a few years ago, and the new guys are really good. The first plow showed up Tuesday night in the middle of the snowstorm. Another one showed up Wednesday when the snow stopped falling, and between the plowing service and a bunch of residents with shovels, our parking lot looked pretty much like this.
There's a driveway along one building that's hard to clear with a plow because people park along it leaving too narrow a path, but later on Wednesday they brought some sort of equipment and cleared the whole thing.
As long as the temperature stays below freezing, snow remains an obdurate mass. Shovels and plows can more it around the landscape, but they can't get rid of it. All the snow on the driveway pictured above ended up in a massive heap in front of the building.
Since it's blocking the public sidewalk, I assume the condo management company has hired a few dump trucks to eventually haul it away.
You know, sometimes a libertarian lesson just finds you. We've cleaned out our lot, driveways, and sidewalks. And as this shot shows, so have a lot of other folks in our neighborhood:
Now take a look at the public street next to our building:
That was north-looking. Here's the view to the south.
Notice anything?
Those of you from non-snowy climates probably can't tell, but the street hasn't been plowed. The path down the street is made entirely by wheel ruts and people who've dug out their parking spaces. The city has yet to plow the side streets.
The north-south street gets a lot of traffic--it's a shortcut to a business area--but the east-west street is pretty quiet. That means it looks even worse:
You can see where people have walked through this area, but there are no wheel tracks. It's impassable to cars.
Since I've taken these pictures, good samaritans with snowblowers have been clearing the streets, and the roads are becoming more usable.
I'm not quite sure what the lesson is here. It's not really that governments provide crappy service. After all, city and country crews have been clearing all the main streets and highways. They're getting a lot done.
I guess the lesson I'm seeing is that in difficult times, most people will take care of themselves and their neighbors pretty well, working together and helping each other out, when they can.
In any case, as soon as the city clears the side streets, we're good to go.
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