Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Note to St. Paul city government: when people say St. Paul should be a Sanctuary City for Snowflakes, they mean a safe space for students at Macalester College where they will not be disturbed by unfamiliar thoughts, not actual, you know, snowflakes.
I was out of town for a few days, missed the big snow. From what I heard, St. Paul got about 12 inches of snow which is a lot in one go but come on, we live in the North, that can’t be enough to cripple the city. School buses stuck? Streets impassable? Mitch wrote about it the other day – drive across Larpenteur Avenue and look at the streets in Roseville. They managed. Why can’t St. Paul?
Parking. St. Paul has narrow streets in the old residential districts and the hard-surface lot coverage ordinance leaves insufficient off-street parking. Plowing around parked cars is pointless so first we wait for the snow to stop, then we wait for people to move their cars, then we wait for cops to ticket the remaining cars so we can wait for tow trucks to tow them, then we plow. Meanwhile, everybody else is driving on the snow, packing it down, polishing the intersections with spinning tires . . . hopeless.
Ban on-street parking from November 1 to April 30 and plow the streets While The Snow Is Falling, before it gets a chance to become unmanageable. Yes, it will cost a fortune. News flash:- that’s why we HAVE a city government, not for trendy developments or grandstanding resolutions. Safe drinking water. Sanitary sewer treatment. Police and fire protection. Passable transportation routes and that means plowing in winter and filling potholes in summer.
Done properly, city government isn’t sexy or exciting, it’s boring. Start boring me. Plow the damned streets.
Joe Doakes
I get the impression most of Saint Paul’s government – mayor, city council, bureaucracy – got into the politics business after spending their formative years playing Sim City. Where the fun part is building big, flashy toys – stadiums, business districts, the cool stuff. Not doing the dirty grind jobs that are the few reasons we’re supposed to try to tolerate city government in the first place.
C’mon, JD. Your tax dollars ARE hard at work. Renaming North to Bold North will solve all the problems.
If St Paul cared about anything related to the economy, helping people out of poverty, or just the general livability of the city, they would implement something like this. At the same time, they would go reverse the zoning regulations so that new apartment developments had higher parking minimums again. What the city currently does in regards to being able to travel efficiently through the city, using any mode of transportation, is ridiculous. Nothing says we don’t care about our residents and potential businesses like impassable streets. Especially, in a climate that should expect snow and the resulting damage from dealing with snow, temperature shifts.
But, but, but, LIGHT RAIL! You need more LIGHT RAIL! And to save the environment, make horses draw the cars!
Ban on-street parking from November 1 to April 30 and plow the streets
Even in Vermont when I lived “in the big city” (which is a strange thing to say, since my town here is larger than “the city” I lived in there) they banned on-street parking when snow was forecast, usually starting 12 hours or so before the snow. And they were quite brutal about towing cars they found on the road during snowfalls, with the tow trucks going out well before the first flakes. Nasty if you counted on on-street parking, but you got used to clean roads and having to move your vehicle.
That’s one thing I really miss from Vermont was that they had a “clean roads” policy: they used salt until the roads were clean and didn’t allow the nasty build up we get here. And studded snow tires were legal — year round! That made a *huge* difference during a storm and when I had to go up some of the back country roads.
On the other hand, I really don’t miss mud season in the least. In a state with 75% dirt roads, mud season was brutal.
Wait, don’t you already have odd/even parking? That should leave enough room to plow and if you park outside, sucks to be you having to dig out. And I do not mean that in a mean way.
Regarding on street parking in older neighborhoods, I remember learning to drive in my dad’s hometown and being subjected to a LONG lesson in parallel parking because my dad was very aware that if you didn’t get within six inches of the curb, passing fire trucks would take off your rear view mirrors. Not surprisingly, most houses had a garage on the alley in back! Is it really that complicated? Apparently yes in a city where the rulers want no rules.
St. Paul government, per the words of PJ O’Rourke, “Everyone wants to save Mother Earth; no one wants to help mom do the dishes.”
And JPA, you can’t have odd and even parking in a city where people get to choose if they are odd or even based on how they feel.
St. Paul is even easier than odd-even parking. Don’t park on the side with Snow Emergency Route signs the night of a snow emergency. Then after the side with the Snow Emergency Route side has been plowed, don’t park where it has not been plowed.
Apparently yes in a city where the rulers want no rules.\
It’s not that they want no rules. It’s that they want no cars.
“It’s not that they want no rules. It’s that they want no cars.”
Well, they are a bit multiple personality about that one. They want no cars for YOU, but they want cars for themselves. They vote for the people who say they are fighting climate change by making it harder to drive. (Virtuous vote in their minds, but really meaningless in any real sense, but that is another point). Then when the people they vote for actually impose the ideas they were elected on, the people complain saying, I thought that would mean for other people, not me. Thus, St Paul doesn’t ever get any decent policies to actually function in any meaningful way. They’re too busy deciding what is good for someone else.