The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Sanitation, to watch the destruction of a few sneckdowns. It was the sixth day in a row below freezing, and Goodman wore a green D.S.N.Y. jacket, a gray beanie, and duck boots. Together, we watched a skid steer, a maneuverable miniature excavator, attack a sneckdown that had built up on a street corner, near a gas station. Conditions were tough. Handheld tools sometimes broke. \u201cThese are one of the only things that can break an ice boulder,\u201d Goodman told me.<\/p>\n
Not every pile of ice is a sneckdown. There is a complex taxonomy. (It helps to know your enemy.) Sanitation workers call sneckdowns corner caps. The narrow path through a sneckdown that lets people cross the street is known as a \u201ccurb cut.\u201d A blocked-off bus stop is not a sneckdown. \u201cI\u2019ve seen people post their own photos and I\u2019ll be, like, \u2018Well that\u2019s not a sneckdown,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Eckerson told me. One helpful heuristic: if you can see tire tracks, it\u2019s not a sneckdown\u2014the cars have been using it. Whether the furrow of snow in a lane of parked cars is a sneckdown depends on your philosophical opinion of what the street is for.<\/p>\n
Most of the time, when people complain about lingering, no-man\u2019s-land snow, they are complaining about something called the curbline. This is the snow that piles up between the cleared path of the sidewalk and the street, often against parked cars, maybe crowned with trash. Property owners don\u2019t have to clear more than a four-foot-wide path, enough for a stroller or a wheelchair; the city doesn\u2019t have to, either.<\/p>\n
Goodman told me it\u2019s simple: if snow is on the street, it\u2019s the city\u2019s responsibility. If it\u2019s on the sidewalk, it\u2019s the property owner\u2019s. But there are complications; the snow around a parked car is the responsibility of the driver\u2014even though it\u2019s on the street. If a bus stop is sheltered, the Department of Transportation is on the hook. A regular bus stop is the responsibility of the property owner whose place abuts the stop, but the city must insure that the bus can pull up to the curb. Previous mayors, Goodman told me, thought it was fine as long as the bus door could open. This year, Mamdani insisted to Sanitation that there be pedestrian access at every stop.<\/p>\n
On Broadway, a crew of emergency shovellers, whom the city pays a starting rate of $19.14 an hour, were deployed to another corner, outside a radiologist\u2019s office. One shoveller, Anthony Gutierrez, who is normally a truck driver, was hacking away at a sneckdown with an ice scraper. Next to him, Daniel Johannes wore a bright orange vest that said \u201claborer\u201d and an ushanka hat. \u201cI have shovelling experience\u2014I once excavated a big hole,\u201d he told me. Johannes lives locally and usually works in construction. This was his third twelve-hour shift. \u201cOur neighbors need to pass these streets,\u201d he said, undeterred.<\/p>\n
Before the recent snowstorm, the city activated PlowNYC, a real-time map showing when every street in the city was last plowed. The computer program that tracks the snowplows is called Blade Runner. When it isn\u2019t snowing, Sanitation uses it to track trash collection. This is because the vast majority of New York City\u2019s snowplows are regular garbage trucks with a plow attached.<\/p>\n
The snowstorm presented an outlet for Mamdani\u2019s embrace of \u201csewer socialism<\/a>,\u201d which focusses on everyday municipal problems. (It could also be a trip wire: the former mayor John Lindsay was pelted for poorly handling a blizzard in the sixties.) During the storm, Mamdani was shovelling out a car trapped near public housing in Bed-Stuy. The Governor, Kathy Hochul<\/a>, told him to put on a hat. Javier Lojan, the acting commissioner of sanitation, told me that Mamdani was at morning roll call with the workers on the first day of the storm. (He said, of the mayor\u2019s shovelling form, \u201cHe\u2019s got to bend his knees a little more, maybe.\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The other day, at the intersection of 174th Street and Broadway, in Washington Heights, I met Joshua Goodman,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":565227,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,10873,246443,6135,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-565226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-america","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-newyork","tag-newyorkcity","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-sanitation","tag-snowstorms","tag-streets","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116011358315359266","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}