Few things in municipal life are more predictable than people complaining about snow plowing. Along with potholes, traffic, taxes and parking, it’s a staple food of civic social media.
That goes double for St. Paul. My city’s drivers have complained about badly plowed streets for as long as I’ve been alive, with such consistent vehemence that it’s become a timeless trope akin to Wile E. Coyote failing to catch the Road Runner. The idea that something might change about the situation is inconceivable to most people.
This is what makes the city’s ongoing experiment with snow plowing so remarkable. For the last two years, St. Paul’s Public Works Department has quietly tried something new, something that might even be described as radical. In this context of caution, the pilot project, dubbed Reimagining Snow Operations, amounts to a moonshot that runs against everything I have come to expect (and be frustrated by) about city governance…