The Lower Mainland’s storm response is snow laughing matter

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It is one of this country’s perennial pastimes: Canadians east of B.C.’s Lower Mainland, ridiculing the inability of Vancouver drivers to navigate roads after even a light dusting of snow. Perhaps we deserve the pile-on for posting all those crocus-blooming photos every January. But the situation over the past week has been genuinely dangerous.

Last Tuesday afternoon, snow began to fall, as was forecast; we had been warned for days that it was coming. And yet, that evening, during (also predictable) rush-hour traffic, chaos ensued.

Cars, buses and trucks slid, sometimes into one another, on slick streets, highways and bridges, causing pileups and intense gridlock. Some people heading home from work were stuck in their cars for hours, in freezing weather, without food, water, or a bathroom. Gas tanks were depleted; phones lost their charges. Others were packed into jammed, unmoving or barely-moving buses.

While people with juice left in their devices posted on social media about their ordeals, the comments from afar were predictable, too: Vancouverites do not know how to drive. Haven’t they ever heard of snow tires? Just stay home, dumbbells!

But why are people blaming the drivers when it was public services that clearly failed that day?

They failed beyond that, too. On Friday – more than two full days after the snowfall – the snow was still causing trouble in some corners of Vancouver. I live at the bottom of a hill and witnessed several cars try to drive down it, with scary results. Unable to brake on the ice, these drivers honked as they approached the intersection, hoping to alert any cars (or God forbid, pedestrians) in their path. There is an elementary school directly across the street at the bottom of the hill.

I also witnessed unsuspecting cars and delivery vans try to drive up the street, get stuck, then have to descend in reverse, horns blaring to warn any oncoming traffic. It was happening as late as Sunday evening and at no point did the city do anything to caution passersby.

Some people do not have the luxury of doing their jobs from home, or taking a snow day. It’s an entirely reasonable expectation that, even in a storm, it should not take 12 hours to do a drive that normally takes 45 minutes. Or that five days after a snowstorm, hilly public streets would be made safe.

As for snow tires, many Vancouverites don’t have them because snow is so infrequent in the city; they are not mandatory in most parts of the Lower Mainland. (A 2021 survey commissioned by the Tire and Rubber Association of Canada found that only 57 per cent of British Columbians owned snow tires.) On the rare occasion that it does snow, those of us without snow tires usually find other ways to get around.

Vancouver’s snow removal budget is small compared to that of cities such as Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa, but then, Vancouver receives far less snowfall: since 1997, it has averaged just 30 centimetres a year.

And so, our infrastructure is ill-prepared: Our bridges, our buses – including trolley buses, whose overhead wires can ice up, preventing them from working – and our SkyTrains. The SkyTrain’s automated emergency brakes have been known to deploy in heavy snowfall because the system can’t tell the difference between snow on the tracks and some other obstruction.

This is not all on the city, of course. One complication is the number of jurisdictions responsible for roads: Multiple municipalities as well as the province, which handles highways, including those troublesome bridges. That makes fixing this mess … messy.

Two councillors from Surrey and New Westminster are now calling for a “snow summit” to discuss ways to ensure the region is better prepared. One of them, Surrey’s Linda Annis, left Vancouver at 7:15 p.m. that Tuesday night and didn’t get home to South Surrey – about 40 kilometres away and a typical commute here – until 4:45 a.m. Snow tires weren’t the issue; she has those. It was the gridlock caused by what she apologetically calls “kind of a perfect storm.”

Ms. Annis says there has been a lot of interest in the snow summit proposal. I hope this idea doesn’t get iced, too, abandoned until the next snowmageddon.

It was fortunate that nobody died in one of those accidents or in one of those freezing cars, pulling an all-nighter. We should be grateful that everyone made it home, eventually. But crossing our fingers is not a good-enough government strategy.

It also says a lot about emergency preparedness around more serious disasters, such as a potential earthquake. It’s one thing for people to be stuck on a bridge for hours in a snowstorm. If the Big One hits, that crisis won’t just melt away.