"500 plows in the whole of the UK"

[randomness]

So, I just heard on PRI's "The World" radio news show that the United Kingdom has 500 snowplows for the entire country.

They gave no context for this number. The story certainly gives the impression that this is very few, but how many is a reasonable number? I don't know how many snowplows Massachusetts has, for example.

Leaving aside whether this is true, whether this number only counts plows under the control of the Ministry of Transport, or what... I still don't know how that number compares with places which get more snow.

I'm not blaming the show, as this was more or less an atmosphere piece about how England has come to a sliding, slippery halt because of the weather; but I am really wondering what a baseline number of plows is for a place that gets snow regularly.

Comments

[redbird]

All I know is that my friend Alan, born and raised in Toronto, thought six was woefully inadequate for Seattle.

[gee-tar.livejournal.com]

Well after 2 minutes of Google searching I couldn't find any information on Massachusetts, but as a basis of comparison, I discovered Wisconsin (no stranger to snow) has 729 snowplows for its highways. Wisconsin is about 65,000 square miles to the UK's 94,000 or so, which would indicate that yeah, 500 does seem a little low. If you assume Wisconsin has the same density of roads (a bad assumption, I admit, since the UK has a significantly higher population) and is reasonably competent at removing snow, that would indicate that the UK should have at least 1000 snowplows.

But I'm only using a single data point and weak conjecture. I'd love to learn more about the issue, but would rather go to bed at this point.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

And that's only highways. Individual towns are probably responsible for their own plowing, as in Massachusetts.

[awfief.livejournal.com]

I was going to use your square mileage approach, but really it depends on how many miles of road (multiplied by # lanes, too, to get basically how many miles of plowing there are).

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

According to arlingtonma.gov:

Depending on the severity and duration of the storm the operation could include as few as 2 vehicles to over 60 pieces of equipment. In a full-scale operation over 2/3 of the equipment on the streets will be private contractors working for the Town.

That's probably part of why data is so hard to find.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

...and that's why arlington's snow removal is pretty darned bad.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

We live around the block from the DPW yard, so ours is actually pretty good.

[contrariety.livejournal.com]

...If this number is correct then I HAVE to assume that most of them are in Scotland.

Maybe they meant England, and not the entire UK?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Could be. They were not clear about this, either.

[stolen-tea.livejournal.com]

For a while, at least, King County in Washington State had 2.

[holmes-iv.livejournal.com]

I was about to chime in with this precise point, but I thought that was actually the City of Seattle, not King County. Pretty positive that's true, too—King County actually goes right up to the Snoqualmie Pass summit (to the great chagrin of some folks East of Issaquah who'd like to subdivide), so at the very least, somebody out that direction owns a bunch of snow equipment.

In any case, I think that's still close to true, but they went out and bought removable plow blades for a lot of the parks department trucks in the late 1990s, so they're not quite as hosed as they once were. In theory, anyway...

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Back when Seattle was having all its snow clearance problems I thought it would be a very amusing hack to drive a Massachusetts Highway Department snow plow to Seattle and significantly increase the number of plows there.

"They told me to plow I-90 until I got to the end, starting in West Stockbridge, so I did. Man, that's a lot longer drive than I expected.

Looks like there's a lot of plowing to be done here. Where do you want me to start?"

It'd also be funny to take a few plow batteries to the UK and Ireland, except they drive on the other side of the road. That, and we're getting more snow today, so we need them ourselves.

[earthling177.livejournal.com]

Oh, Gosh, I was gonna tell you this story when you were here and forgot, altho, chances are, I may have already told you this years ago.

So, I forgot where the guy was from, either US or Canada, but I think from around the Great Lakes. Either way, he worked for the same company my brother used to work in Brazil, and they have factories in lots of different countries. In any case, a few years ago, both of them were in France and overheard some story of people getting killed by avalanches during winter. So the guy says "that's weird, where I'm from, they have patrols and equipment and they use dynamite to prevent avalanches that are serious enough to kill people, why don't they do it here, the tech is really simple?" and the French guy says essentially, "C'est la vie, they know it's risky, they go anyway, why should we have to pay to save their asses?" -- which makes me wonder if people in Europe in general are just so used to snow hosing everything that they don't care the country stops for a while.

And I'll join the other voices, I don't think even places in US have enough snow equipment to deal with storms except that they hire private people to work for them during emergencies. Because no matter how small the area they are talking about is (even if it's just England, for example, instead of UK), 500 plows seems a tad too little. Definitely they won't be done in a day or two.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Yeah. In Canada, they use artillery.

From http://www.dnd.ca/site/commun/ml-fe/article-eng.asp?id=3569:

MOUNT REVELSTOKE, B.C. — Are you among the 2 800 daily motorists who travel the Trans-Canada Highway through Rogers Pass during the treacherous winter months? Whatever your reason, your ability to safely transit this 18 km stretch of highway can be greatly credited to the efforts of Canadian soldiers who help Parks Canada with avalanche control.

For over 45 years, the 1st Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery (1 RCHA) from Shilo, Man., has used artillery fire to assist Parks Canada with avalanche control in Rogers Pass/Glacier National Park, B.C.

Artillery fire from 105 mm howitzers, towed to one of 18 roadside circular gun platforms, is often used to artificially trigger an avalanche rather than risk the volatility of a naturally occurring avalanche. “Our goal is to induce an avalanche before it can become larger and therefore a danger to traffic,” said Lieutenant Robert Vandermolen, troop commander.

Parks Canada operates the world’s largest mobile avalanche control program to keep the Trans-Canada Highway and the Canadian Pacific Railway operating through Rogers Pass. During winter months, snow avalanche technicians maintain a constant watch over weather and snowpack conditions. The artillery takes its cues on when and where to fire from these snow experts.

“The only live fire that happens on the highway is in defence of that highway and is co-ordinated by my team,” said Bruce McMahon, senior avalanche officer at Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Parks. “We close and sweep the highway in the area of concern to ensure there are no civilian vehicles within the danger or avalanche areas before beginning avalanche control operations.”

Under the direction of the avalanche forecasters from Parks Canada, the Army bombards known trigger zones high up the avalanche paths. The shock waves from exploding shells fired by the artillery will trigger avalanches when snow conditions are right. With the highway closed, the avalanches can thunder harmlessly down the slopes.

I remember seeing the signs for this when we drove down the Trans-Canada.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, It's probably municipal snowplows, maybe for roads not owned by particular towns?
I doubt they are counting personal snowplows that individuals would have on their private vehicles. In my town here in MA. every other person has a pickup with a snowplow.

[karakara98.livejournal.com]

Interesting--Yesterday I met with my boss to prepare for a presentation I'm giving next week. He told me I needed to beef it up with some numbers, but that they had to be numbers that were in context and relevant. You've nicely reinforced the point that sharp people catch it when numbers don't quite make sense--even when they're true.

[railwaymadness]

Arlington, Va: 18 inches average annual snowfall, 70 pieces of snow control equipment, 312 miles of roads, $600,000 annual budget.
Minneapolis, Mn: 45 inches average annual snowfall, 100 pieces of snow control equipment, about 1500 miles of roads, $7 million annual budget.

My totally unscientific reading of wikipedia leads me to believe that the January weather in the UK is more similar to that in Atlanta and as far as I can tell, Atlanta occasionally deploys two sand trucks but doesn't admit to owning much of anything else.

Arlington, Va doesn't bother plowing if snowfall is less than four inches and the sun is going to shine. Since the vast majority of the populated UK areas has more days with snow falling than days with snow lying, I'm starting to think 500 plows might be totally reasonable.

[evilmagnus]

And that'll be municipal (local council) owned equipment. I remember from MA that they had tons of private individuals who had plow attachments that could be hired as contractors when the snow hit. That's just not something that's done in the UK - both the idea that the local council would hire Bob with his plow, or that Bob would even own a plow and a truck big enough to use it from.

[ravenzanne.livejournal.com]

Per the Seattle Times, from last year's storm - the City of Seattle had 27 "trucks" for plowing/sanding. It sure didn't seem like it. But like others have commented, we don't have the independent contractors to rely on. (Heck I don't even own a shovel) Thankfully no snow here this year.

[chotii.livejournal.com]

You know what amused me? I mean besides having to CHAIN UP to get OUT OF MY DRIVEWAY last year?

They didn't want to use salt on the roads, because "it might go into Puget Sound." Finally, somebody pointed out that Puget Sound is SALTWATER.

This year they were prepared, with salt/brine/etc. Of course, we haven't had any snow (yet).

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I think it's the "Private Contractors" that make snow-removal in MA work, and that makes a problem for other places... The state can't afford to (and would be foolish to) own and maintain the number of plows needed in case of the sort of snow load we get every 3 to 5 years. Talking out my ass, it would be easy to imagine that more MA residents own the medium- to heavy-duty pick-up trucks and other consumer-grade trucks capable of pushing a plow, than all UK residents combined. It's just a more common American-pastime, owning a big truck, than it is Brit, I think.

If you have a truck and a drive-way or garage, you can invest in a plow and get on the State call-list. It's kind of a brilliant system, even if the down-side is that it relies on our abhorrent love of gas-gusslers.

[chotii.livejournal.com]

When my family lived in Eastern Washington state and Montana, my father's pickup truck *always* had a plow blade he could attach in winter. He plowed our driveway, our neighbor's driveways, our entire road (Google Maps 'Bentley Road, Colville WA', and as like as not, keep the plow down all the way to town. Then he plowed out the business parking lot and sometimes other local businesses' parking lots. Or he delegated this to my brothers. I never did do it myself.

Stevens County would never have plowed out Bentley Road. It was then, and may still be, simply an oiled gravel road, and it didn't rate plowing by the county.

[redbird]

New York City handles this by attaching plows to the large truck fleet it owns anyway, which spends most of its time collecting household garbage.

[allyphoe.livejournal.com]

The City of Tulsa has 37 snowplows and 58 spreaders (dump trucks that toss salt / sand mix out the back as they go - we get much more ice than snow). 400,000 residents, 182 square miles, with high road density. They make no attempt to plow or salt the neighborhoods, though - just the arterial roads and highways. Average days below freezing: 72. Average snowfall: 9 inches.

this is 100% true

[mryt-maat.livejournal.com]

Go you. Having recently lived through a HUGE blizzard in Tulsa- they sure as heck don't even try on the neighborhoods.

Re: this is 100% true

[allyphoe.livejournal.com]

I live in unincorporated Wagoner County - they don't even plow the arterial roads near me.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

There is something like a "Somerville Magazine", kinda a glossy cover. Anyways, I was reading a part of it at lyonesse's house while out there, and the article I was reading was about snow removal in Somerville, Cambridge, and one other, similar, town.

I only vaguely remember numbers, but Somerville has somewhere between 30 and 60 pieces of snow removal equipment, and have a snow removal budget of about $340K. It is the one budget item that is allowed to go over as needed. Cambridge had somewhere between 50 and 85 pieces of snow removal equipment, and has a snow removal budget of about $500K. I forget the area figures and road mileage figures completely. I didn't finish the article, but it was pretty interesting. (It was nominally about the Somerville manager of snow removal.)

I bet you could figure out what magazine I'm speaking of and find it.

this annoyed me as well

[mryt-maat.livejournal.com]

I also have only a vague idea of how big England's road system is compared to, say, Oklahoma. I know how big the country is- but it would have been nice to know how many miles of road we are talking about. For instance- there are huge stretches of Alaska that have no roads to really speak of...they don't use plows for good reason.