Riding dusty streets requires true grit
Clean sweep of abrasive stone unlikely before the end of June
Scree. A collection of loose rock debris.
From the Old English scrithan, to slip.
Related to the Old Norse, skritha, to slide.
Welcome to Edmonton’s scree season. Our back alleys, bike lanes and roads are littered with sand and gravel.
When the wind gusts, the dust cloud makes the city look something like a scene from Dune or Lawrence of Arabia. When the wind really blows, your face gets sandblasted. But the problem isn’t just dust in the wind. The scree is also a significant hazard for people on bike or motorcycles. The same sand and rocks the city spreads to give our cars traction in winter conspires to send cyclists and bikers slipping and sliding come spring.
If our scree problem seems worse than usual, you’re right.
This year, the city put 185,000 tonnes of “abrasive materials” on the roads — a blend of coarse sand and quarried limestone chips, mixed with salt and calcium chlorate. That’s more than a handful of dust. In fact, Bob Dunford, the city’s director of roadway maintenance, says that’s 23 per cent more than usual, the most the city has used in a decade.
“The amount you use depends upon your temperature range and your number of freeze-thaw cycles,” he says.
The city needed to give us rockier roads this year, not only because we had April snow, but because of warm spells in January and February.
The late spring also meant city street sweepers didn’t hit the roads until three weeks later than usual. Even though the city’s 22 street sweepers are on the road 20 hours a day, even though the city has contracted for the services of two dozen more freelance sweepers, Dunford says the streets won’t all be cleaned until the end of June.
Total budget for this year’s spring cleaning is $12 million.
“The same people who complain that we don’t put down enough sand in the winter? As soon as it melts, they say, ‘Why did you put down so much? Why don’t you clean up the streets?’” sighs Dunford. “I think it seems worse than ever this year because we’re so late. It’s already almost June and people are saying, ‘Why isn’t it cleaned up?’ They’re right. It usually is. And it soon will be.”
A clean sweep can’t come soon enough for Christopher Chan, executive director of the Edmonton Bicycle Commuters.
“I haven’t noticed it to be particularly worse than past years,” says Chan. “That said, the previous years were also pretty awful.”
The big problem, he says, is that cyclists who try to ride near the curb, out of the traffic, end up facing the most hazards from sand and gravel.
The designated bike lanes, he says, are actually the most unsafe of all.
“When you get out to the bike lanes, you have to sweep away the sand to find the markings. The bike lanes are actually the worst. In the winter, they’re used for snow storage. In the summer, if feels like they’re being used for sand storage.”
Chan believes the sweeper trucks actually push debris into the bike lanes and curb lanes, creating a greater risk.
Not true, says Dunford. Actually, he says, city crews sweep the sand from the boulevards and sidewalks on the road, so the street sweepers can clean it up later. (Which rather reminds me of the days when I used to clean my mother’s kitchen table by wiping the crumbs onto the floor.)
But whoever is to blame, it will take another month before it’s tidied up.
Chan would like the city to make bike lanes a streetsweeping priority. But Dunford says it wouldn’t be an efficient use of street-sweeper resources to target bike lanes, instead of doing neighbourhoods all at once. Besides, he says, motorcyclists are also calling, asking for the major arterial roads to be cleared as a top priority. With so much to clean, his sweepers are working round the clock. The rest of us will just have to be patient. And careful. And demonstrate true grit.
The good news? This year’s 185,000 tonnes of scree won’t go to waste. Dunford says the city routinely picks up about 70 per cent of the sand and limestone it puts on the street. The material is then cleaned and recycled, for reuse the next winter. So we can start this cycle all over again — gravel to gravel, dust to dust, trying to find some way to keep our streets as safe as possible for everyone, all year round.