Sanitation Promises to Plow Bike Lanes at the Same Time As Roads

All we need now is some snow!

Drivers will no longer have priority over cyclists for snow removal, as Department of Health officials pledged Wednesday to clear bike lanes this winter at the same time as the rest of the roads .

The promise from Health Commissioner Jessica Tisch comes after DSNY officials he insisted for years workers clear roads for emergency vehicles first snow removal it happens on cycle paths. With flakes in the forecast after two dry years of significant snow, DSNY has customized for this year to meet the needs of both modes, Tisch said.

“For the first time, DSNY has the staff and equipment to serve both types of travel infrastructure simultaneously,” the commissioner told reporters at the agency’s Spring Street garage in Manhattan on Wednesday.

“For the first time the plan calls for doing both at the same time, rather than prioritizing one over the other or making trade-offs.”

Three years ago, the leaders of Sanità really sorry to not clear snow from critical bike lanes – in response to reports from Streetsblog. DSNY staff and mechanical infrastructure have failed to keep up with the expansion of protected bike infrastructure and the pandemic-era boom in cycling, officials said.

Ed Grayson, then health commissioner he promised to do better. The agency tested smaller plow vehicles to clear bike lanes, eventually buying 44 of them. The city’s snow removal fleet consists of about 3,200 machines, most of which are garbage trucks that the agency repurposes for snow.

Smaller vehicles also serve a double purpose swapping the shovel for brushes – allowing them to clean bike paths that are too narrow for regular road-sweeping vehicles.

But using the large fleet of small plows — enough to cover 165 miles of protected bike paths, according to the city — still cam second to clear the streets of cars if staffing levels do not allow for both.

Officials have hired 563 more DSNY workers since the last “plowed snow event” in early 2022, officials said Wednesday. The agency also updated its annual statutory mandate snow planewhich previously codified the supremacy of snow-clearing car streets, to reflect the change.

DSNY is “committed to dispatching bike plows at the same time as street plows to help make protected bike lanes passable during and shortly after snowfall events,” the snow plan now reads . The agency no longer classifies certain roads as “primary”. , secondary and tertiary”.

“Every street in the city is on a road and we are customized to dispatch every road at the same time. The priority of certain roads is a thing of the past,” said Tisch.

The snow operation ran away from Mayor Adams budget cuts proposed mid-yearTisch said Wednesday.

last winter set a record low for snowfall at 2.3 inches — not enough for any day to qualify as “plowable” for DSNY. Weather forecasts expect between 18 and 26 inches this winter, still below the historical average of 29.8 inches.

The agency also has more than 100 so-called “skid steer machines” that clear snow from hard-to-reach areas like bus stops and fire hydrants, but are much slower to clear tracks of bicycle.

Advocates have praised Sanitation for taking action on bike lane policies that other parts of the city routinely fail to enforce, such as police not enforcing enforcement against drivers who clear bike lanes. .

“Having an operational agency come in and get it right is good and great,” said Jon Orcutt, the director of advocacy at Bike New York.

“The big question is, are we fighting the last war and will it ever end.”