Sweden clears snow-covered walkways before roads (2018)
usa.streetsblog.org
usa.streetsblog.org
What usually happens when it start to freeze is the deployment of sand and salt. Sidewalks is often addressed using three wheel vehicle or buggies that city cleaning and maintenance usually deploy, small sized roads commonly deploy normal tractors, while large roads and highways has specialized vehicle. All get deployed at the same time. If there is a sudden massive snowstorm, snowmobiles can replace the smallest ones but then there really need to be a lot of snow.
The only change, if there is one, is that I usually don't see tractors being deployed in cities as much now days. That might mean smaller side streets inside cities has gotten deprioritized, through with salt/sand I can't say how much of an impact that really have. They are mostly just glorified parking spaces anyway, and if there is a snow storm then it doesn't have a large impact compared to major roads or major walkways around schools and hospitals. If there is a huge snowstorm which prevents the snow clearing from effectively working, then the recommendation is to close down schools and work places until things calm down.
Edit: As several answers point out, snow is being cleared, just not all the way to the asphalt. Which is what I meant as well, apologies if that wasn't clear.
There are people ready in all corners of the country, city and countryside, to work on clearing the roads when it's necessary.
You can find maps and road prioritization per Län here: https://www.trafikverket.se/resa-och-trafik/underhall-av-vag...
The lowest priority roads on the map (gray) state: After 3 cm of snowfall, the road is expected to be cleared inside the following 6 hours.
However, in the northern parts/and or rural areas, you have a layer of packed snow/ice during the winter season. Snow is still cleared regularly that fall on that layer, but the underlying asphalt/gravel isn’t revealed during winter.
The E10 is the main highway connected Northern Sweden and Norway, and it gets a lot of truck traffic.
I have been living in north Sweden all my life, in tiny villages with 100 people and cities with 100.000 people. They all do it. It might even be better done in small villages because they will use local companies that live there and does their hometown on contract every year.
It's not as black and white as the article makes it out to be. Roads are definitely being cleared before every walkway is done, they are just prioritized higher rather than being the last on the list as it is common in other places.
[1]: https://trafik.stockholm/gator-torg/sno-halka/ (Swedish, Google Translate works quite well[2])
[2]: https://trafik-stockholm.translate.goog/gator-torg/sno-halka...
The trafikled can probably most similarly be described as a highway, even though we drive on them in the city as well (in lower speed)
With the amount of cars that naturally clear the snow on these highways, it also makes it even more common that in practice the walkways gets prioritized first, as in the article states happened last year.
Trafikleder: Blötsnö/modd 1 cm Lös snö 2 cm
Trottoarer, gång- och cykelbanor: Blötsnö/modd 1-1,5 cm Lös snö 2-3 cm
Vägar/gator (körbana): Blötsnö/modd 2-2,5 cm Lös snö 4-5 cm [1]
I live in Stockholm.
[1] https://via.tt.se/pressmeddelande/snorojningspremiar-sa-snor...
How can it be fairer? If you clear surface A before surface B, the people using surface A will always benefit from that, it doesn't matter who those people are. If you reverse it, the other people will benefit instead.
So, let's say you want to divide the population into two groups, X and Y, so that if you treat group X better than Y it doesn't matter since the division was fair so the treatment is fair. What is the best way to divide? I don't think there is any way of dividing that is more fair than any other, because there will always be the losing half, and the losing half will always be able to call themselves a name and say that they are discriminated against. As long as you are not intentionally selecting people with some traits differently than others, I don't think you can do any better.
Example. There are four persons, A, B, C and D. Which way of dividing them is more fair? AB/CD or AC/BD? There is no way to answer this because the fairness is not in how they are divided, it's in why they are divided the way they are. It's like asking: which is the most random number, 34 or 92? Randomness is not in the number, it's in how it was selected.
Category B on the other hand have a clear advantage. They have the engine and the antispin which makes them able to go through 15-30 cm snow without much problem as long as there aren't too many snow drifts, wet snow or packed areas. They are not allowed on the bicycle roads anyway and would not fit there.
Besides, the main roads are taken care of a completely different entity so they already have their roads plowed anyway. They just have to get the first few hundred meters out on the main road and they are fine. Bonus if you have a buss road close by because they are priority -1, if anything is plowed, you can be certain it's the buss roads.
Yes, I bicycle all year round but I also drive a car. Trust me, it's fair to do the walkways first, my car can handle the snow just fine most of the time. If not I'm not supposed to be out anyway. :-)
Because the two groups are not necessarily of exactly the same size?
Proving that ...
This assumes that people using "surface A" and "surface B" are equally prone to accidents, that accidents are equally dangerous independent of the surface and in general that the inconvenience is equal, which is not the case for icy roads and icy sidewalks.
Assume that each surface has an "ice cost" to its users that we want to minimize. Icy surface A has a cost of 1 and icy surface B has a cost of 3. When a surface is cleared of ice, its ice cost is zero.
Consider then that there are two demographics X and Y. X always uses surface A. Y always uses surface B.
* Uncleared, demographic Y pays a higher price.
* If you clear surface A but not surface B, X will pay nothing, and Y will still pay the same price; the cost disparity has grown.
* If you clear surface B, the cost disparity will shrink. The opportunities of demographics X and Y are more equal than before. If demographic X and Y are roughly equal in size, you have also minimized the total ice cost to society.
On the other hand, if I had a dollar for the number of times I bruised myself as a child I'd be a rich man.
If you are in Scandinavia most outdoor and sport shops have them.
Just remember to take then off then you go inside =)
Essentially it's about walking without ever putting your feet down such that they apply lateral force to the ground, however. Do that right, and it doesn't matter how slippery it is.
...and then you also can't apply force, so you can't walk. The hard part is to automatically test the ground you're standing on, ramping up the force fast enough to make progress, without thereby slipping. It's so automatic, I can't explain how or why it works. I suspect it's getting done in the spinal column, even.
People who slip mostly just needs better shoes/tires, the difference between good and bad shoes/tires is huge. I have biked in Sweden during the winter, no problems at all, winter tires fixes most issues.
It shows several ways public services were "hacked" from the point of view of gender equality, leading to better results for everyone. And I think questioning assumptions is very much a HN thing :-)
(Unlike the headline writer, I've understood the examples to be "we're trying this in at least one city in Sweden" rather than "all of Sweden does this all the time".)
Why not simply look at statistics like that, without "gender hacking"? And how long have they been doing it, do they have updated statistics? Also severity of the injuries? What about the emergency doctors trying to reach patients on roads that are not cleared? What number of injuries are we talking about?
"An analysis of Sweden’s snow clearance practices showed that it disadvantaged women, who were more likely to walk, while employment districts where men predominantly worked were more likely to have streets plowed first."
> What about the emergency doctors trying to reach patients on roads that are not cleared?
Generally not a problem, snow is cleared from roads quite promptly all over Scandinavia.
I've lived in Norway for nearly forty years and have never been able to call my employer saying that I can't get to work (22 km away) because of snow or ice. It has never even been a cause of me being late for work.
That's how it should be really. Having lived in some really cold countries, people just....go about with their day. Snow on the road? Have winter tyres and/or chains, it's really not a big deal.
Now I live in the UK and it's hilarious(and sad) to see offices, schools and kindergadens close when there is FROST on the road - not even snow, just the temperatures are below zero, things are a bit frozen, so my kindergarden calls me up not to come in today because they determined it's too dangerous for parents to drive in. Like....what??? I know everyone in this country uses summer tyres all year round but sheesh, just....get a grip(pun not intended). When there is actual snow on the road(and I mean like....1 inch of it) it's like apocalypse hit, police advise people not to leave their homes, no one knows how to drive(or if they do they inevitably drive 3mph, even thought he road has been cleared and salted)......I know it's "unusual", but it's not like Egypt where they see snow once in 20 years - it does snow pretty much every year for a few days.
We have a similar issue with heat-related rail buckling closing lines in the summer. If you run a railway in Morocco it's a lot hotter and you never close lines for that reason - but that's because the tension of the rails there is adjusted for hotter temperatures. A hard frost would cause Moroccan rails to fracture as they shrank, while ours remain within tolerance.
> Plow the sidewalks first because of the social preference to protect women
> Emergency services are not impacted because snow is cleared from the roads promptly
Either we sacrificed men/drivers in favor of women/walkers or we just did more snow clearing.
So now they probably just had the sidewalk clearers start work earlier, and clean an extra time, problem seemingly solved.
Also the interpretation that it is "discrimination of women" seems dubious. After all, they are probably walking because they don't have to get to work, like the men (including the snowplough drivers). Then you are down to subjective values (not having to work vs slipping on ice and so on). Somehow people have forgotten that working is not an end in itself, but usually a means to support a family.
The injuries are generally bruises. Sprains, at worst. Slipping and falling is painful, but unless you're old and frail you're very unlikely to crack or break anything.
This is like a time honored tradition of everyone pitching in to clear the snow so we can all get on with our lives. This is for commercial zoned areas as well as residential.
Further, neighborhood streets are often cleared by private contractors hired by the city, while the larger plows do the big roads. Apparently you can make 300 dollars an hour if you've got a truck and plow attachment when it snows, but you need to be ready to jump into action.
What we are talking about is the parts of the street that is state owned like designated bicycle/pedestrian roads separate from the road.
All the plowing is also done by a private contractor that has a prenegotiated contract with the state before winter comes. They in their turn will hire whatever they can get their hands on if it's a bad winter.
I would guess that the salary for driving a snowplow is higher in Sweden than many other places.
Cost of labor is a factor, but it isn't the only one. As I said, you are far better of having enough to keep ahead of the worst possible case snowfall than less people who can handle only the normal snowfall and take weeks to dig out of the bad ones. And that is just the pure monitory costs of clearing snow and says nothing about the other costs to society from being slow to clear snow (emergency services for example)
Anyway, I think their priorities are very sensible.
You can make something a priority, but the difference must be limited because of the nature of the ongoing work (unless you de-prioritize the other to the point where snow isn't plowed at all)
They first just run the plow everywhere, then they switch to machines to move the worst snowpiles away from corners and make more space for the next snowstorm so the plow can run again. If you don't do this, the roads will get smaller and smaller for each snowstorm.
Priority is buss roads, main roads and priority 1 bicycle/walkways, then they start on priority 2 roads and bicycle/walkways. The sidewalks are used for snowdumps until they have time to remove them.
The inner city areas doesn't have enough space to store snow so it gets carried by trucks to designated snowdumps that may or may not be empty by the next winter. Our town had several excavators digging in the snow piles all summer to try to make them melt faster. They didn't succeed this summer so they are dumping on top of last years snow.
Perhaps this is why it's notable for a large percentage of the HN audience?
But definitely an interesting experiment to try!
What's the current status of this policy?
> Not only was the impact of snow clearance priorities discriminatory, there were negative consequences for society as a whole. Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in Sweden than while driving. And the cost of those injuries far exceeds the cost of snow clearance.
I fail to see how the analysis somehow found the ostensible gender imbalance of clearing roads before walkways more salient than the fact that icy conditions caused a greater human cost in walking accidents than driving accidents, which is expressed almost as an afterthought.
Surely the data about the number of accidents and their gravity was much more available and actionable than a roundabout assumption about men being more likely to work and therefore to drive to work, and women being more likely to be disadvantaged and therefore more likely to walk?
Wouldn't it make more sense that the gender imbalance was only noticed after having implemented the measure based on more simple data?
The point being that such task forces are beneficial and policy changes addressing such imbalances often end up benefiting everyone.
Parents need to get their kids to school and daycare, navigate the environment with strollers and carriers and work around their kids needs. One example was trying to drop off a child at a daycare, a school and then making it to work. A trip that will need many transfers and sometimes doubling back on a route. If you're trudging through 15cm of snow and bus service is dodgy earlier in the day it's going to be a time.
If you want to learn more about this in a broader sense check out "Feminist City" by Leslie Kern, it's on audible if a long drive is part of your commute. It wanders a bit, but does a pretty good job surveying how women, gender diverse, disabled and other bodies navigate and cope with the environment. Check it out!