Port Alberni snow

 

As the only pedestrian in Port Alberni, I can definitely tell you that this is not a pedestrian-friendly city.  As well as the fact that most of the sidewalks are older than I am, and therefore buckled, cracked, and a danger to footing for those of my age, there is the fact that the city allows householders to overgrow the sidewalks that *do* exist with hedges, sometimes taking up four feet, of a five-foot wide sidewalk, as well as moss which, despite its extremely slow growth, has, over the years that it has been unimpeded, grown to considerable size.

But the real test of Port Alberni's aversion to pedestrians comes during the snow.  Almost nobody clears their sidewalks.  There is, supposedly, a bylaw about snow clearance on sidewalks.  It is not enforced.  And therefore everybody ignores it.  Snow clearance on sidewalks is extremely limited at the very best.  Generally speaking, it's non-existent.  Nobody walks, so nobody cares about the sidewalks.

Of course, there are some who do clear their sidewalks.  Sometimes two or three houses in a row may do so.  But, that leaves the rest of the block.  Which means, it's pointless to try and walk, even on the cleared areas.  You come to the end of the cleared areas and then you have to clamber over snow banks, compressed snow, and possibly icy patches.  If you don't want to fight your way down those stretches of sidewalk, then you have to make your way, through the snow banks, on to the roadway, to continue your journey.  Oh, and remember, those extremely wide streets in Port Alberni?  Well, most of them, when the snow falls, have one lane of traffic that has been worn down by cars driving on it.  Right in the middle.  So you've got twenty feet, or more, of snow that you have to clamber over, to get from the sidewalk to the road, or from the road to the sidewalk.

And, of course, this includes the corners and intersections.  As a matter of fact, the corners of blocks, at the intersections, are possibly the very worst.  No one clears the wheelchair ramps, of course, because they don't belong to anybody.  And, in any case, they are at the corner, and the corner is where everybody doesn't drive.  So you have the greatest depth between the curved sidewalk, and the point where one travel Lane going in one direction meets another travel plane going in the other direction.  Generally speaking, this extends out about thirty feet, rather than the twenty that is the normal margin of snow bordering the driven area.

So, generally, you have to walk on the road.  The Port Alberni drivers, not the best drivers in any case, seem to have real trouble with this.  Not knowing what pedestrians *are* (after all, I'm the only one), they seem to see pedestrians as oddly shaped and very slow vehicles, whose owners must be intimidated into buying larger and faster vehicles.

And then, of course, it starts to rain.  And the water percolates down through the snow, forming considerable depth of wet snow, which, to your shoes, is indistinguishable from a puddle.  Although puddles usually aren't eight inches deep.  The snow, of course, dams up the water, and so there is nowhere for the water to drain away to.  So we have standing water of quite incredible depths, damned up by various snow banks.  These, of course, generally occur where you, as a pedestrian, have to try and gain access either to the sidewalk, or to the road, or some other location.  The areas that have been cleared out in order to create a driveway for the cars, provide snow banks on either side, which prevent drainage.  Yet more ponds and lakes.

Snow generally doesn't last too long around Port Alberni.  This is a temperate climate, and so the temperature generally falls just enough to create snow, if indeed it does fall that far, and then warms up again, generally turning to rain.  The population of Port Alberni depends on this.  Part of the reason that they don't clear their sidewalks is that they think this is a useless exercise: the snow is going to be washed away by the rain in a couple of days anyway.

Except that sometimes it doesn't.  The snow, in our current situation, has been rained upon.  The temperature has warmed up some.  We are no longer in any danger of having any more snow.  However, there has not been sufficient rain for it to have washed away the snow completely.  So, we have heavy, water-soaked snow lying everywhere around town, creating the aforementioned lakes and ponds.  But it's not going away.  Today it's not raining.  So, even though the temperature is slightly above freezing, the snow isn't going to go anywhere.  And, of course, if the temperature does fall, even just a degree or two, the water soaked snow will, of course, freeze.  And we will have tons of ice everywhere.  And, of course, if that happens, and the sidewalks are covered with ice, nobody is even going to attempt to clear their sidewalk, because nobody has really serious snow removal shovels.  The metal kind.  With sharp front tips to break and lift the ice.