With up to four centimetres of snow expected to hit Toronto tomorrow morning, city officials - mindful of last season's near-record snowfall - were quick to say yesterday that they are ready for winter and are even pledging to keep a pair of key cycling routes clear this year.
Councillors on the city's parks committee will discuss a plan today to make special efforts to clear two east-west bike routes into the downtown, one along the "multi-use path" along Lake Shore Boulevard and Queens Quay from the east, and the other on the Queensway and King Street West.
The plan also calls for a study of how much it would cost to clear the waterfront Martin Goodman Trail for use by well-bundled cyclists all winter.
Parks committee chairwoman Paula Fletcher acknowledged that some residents of her downtown ward whose streets were left clogged with ice and snow last year might scratch their heads at the idea, but she said it is important to encourage all-season cycling.
"I think everybody learned lessons from last year that if you don't get it early, you have a frozen, rutted street," said Ms. Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth), noting that the city's large snowplows had trouble servicing many narrow streets in her ward, meaning snow was left to turn to rock-hard ice.
Last winter, the city was slammed with five times as much snow as it usually gets - 207 centimetres downtown - and about four times the number of complaints from residents about snow-clearing, with 17,615 calling to gripe.
"We reached the point where some of those local side streets in the inner part of the city were beginning to get impassable," said Peter Noehammer, the city's director of transportation services, who blamed the sheer volume of snow for the problem.
This year, he said, the city's snow strategy will be more "pro-active," tackling icy conditions and moving more quickly to actually remove, rather than just plow, snow on key routes if needed. He also said the city would pay special attention to sidewalks to make it easier for pedestrians to get around.
Mr. Noehammer said yesterday that the city's full fleet of 200 salt trucks is ready for tomorrow's expected snow. Not all of the city's 600 street plows and 300 sidewalk plows are yet on stand-by - the contracts start up gradually so that the full fleet is in place by Dec. 1 - but he said they likely won't be needed tomorrow.
Last winter's massive snowfall is still having an effect on the city budget. When the books close on 2008, the city will have overspent its $63-million snow budget by about $20-million, Mr. Noehammer said, almost completely draining its emergency snow reserve fund.
He said Toronto is ready for whatever comes this winter, even if it is another punishing 200-plus centimetres.
"When I talk to my colleagues in Ottawa or Montreal, they laugh at that," Mr. Noehammer said. "That's average for them."
Yvonne Bambrick, a spokeswoman for the Toronto Cyclists Union, a lobby group, praised the city for pledging to clear routes with cyclists in mind, and said that if the city does go ahead with plowing the Martin Goodman Trail, a growing number of cyclists will use it all winter long.
"This is my fifth winter riding," Ms. Bambrick said. "It's definitely doable."
