The video is cute but it is also very misleading. There aren't a meter of snow on the road while the walk ways are clear. Snowplows also do not place snow on walkways. There is a lot of artistic freedom being deployed in order to convey the message that walkways are now also being prioritized, and in particular the walkways around schools.
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.
People need to know that when they read about "Sweden" it's often about the central parts of Stockholm. Plowing is not a culture thing it's a political decision for public roads.
Street plowing is only really happening in the big Swedish cities and on highways anyway. On the countryside, everyone has studded tires on their cars, so they only put gravel on the roads.
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.
Of course country roads are plowed too if need be. Every small city where there are roads that needs to be plowed are plowing their roads. Depending on where in the country you are and how common it is with snow, roads may be plowed sooner or later. It's definitely not only the big cities.
No, it's all cleared. You can't drive on the roads if the ice is still there in spring. You will sink 2 dm down and when that freezes over again, the road is only usable by tanks. All roads that needs it will be scraped of ice sooner or later.
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.
Roads are definitely cleared from snow outside of cities. This is an example from the middle of nowhere, where signs of clearing can be seen: https://goo.gl/maps/1b7Aj8pb3ejsQPHs7
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.
I remember driving from Kiruna to Abisko National Park (read: from a tiny town in the far north of Sweden to a national park in the middle of nowhere) and there were huge tractors cleaning the snow in both directions almost as soon as the snow had passed a few inches.
From the point of view of an American, for example, that's like a road in the north of Alaska, connecting the only two more or less significant towns in something like 100 miles... the area around Kiruna probably has less than one million people in a 1,000 mile radius, it's really a low population area we're talking about.
True, we are only 9 million people total and the north is mostly uninhabited. I totally see how that feels tiny. Anyway by your description I pictured a small winding 1-line 40mph road, not a 55mph banked 2lane road
Stockholm has a page on their website describing their current plan[1].
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.
I can't find the info your referring to in your links. The walkways and bikelanes _are_ prioritized (at least over common roads). This is done with a model based on different criterias for different types of roads. The biggest roads (trafikled) are prioritized with the least amount of snow - if enough snow
(cm) gathers (over the criteria in the table below) they are forced to clear it. Then the walkways (trottoar/gångbana) and bikelanes (cykelbana). Then the regular streets/smaller roads (vägar/gator).
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]
> So the order was reversed. Municipalities faced no additional cost for clearing pedestrian paths first. And it reduced injuries, in addition to being objectively fairer.
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.
See it like this. A = Pedestrians, B = Cars. A has no protection and no engine help to get forward. They have to go in deep snow that resists every step. Try walking on those 30 cm high gymnastics carpets that feathers the fall. It's like that. They won't stay on the unplowed bike roads. Bicycles can't travel in 10 cm snow. They will be on whatever surface have been cleared already. If that is the highway, that's where they will be.
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. :-)
> 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.
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.
I was assuming that the "fair" part was about the gender of people because that seems to be what most of the article is about. The rest of the reasons for doing this make sense so my question was mostly, what does this have to do with people's gender? It seems like they imply that this is a bigger problem because of the distribution of people's gender, than it would have been with another distribution.
And also because it's not the only variable at play. Considering the variable "protection against the elements", one of the groups have cars as protection, while other have mere shoes or bikes. So different variables can be combined to try to balance things out.
Nice point. Made me think about people who have a choice to drive or walk. If the sidewalks aren't cleared they may choose to drive. This could lead to congestion for drivers. It could even be that people who can only drive benefit more when the sidewalks are cleared first.
I happen to be visiting Stockholm this week. I don't know much about their snow-clearing practices, but I've been surprised by the amount of ice that is allowed to remain on roads and walkways. The sidewalks are in fair condition—though I slipped and totally wiped out this morning (not a common occurrence for me) when I was hurrying to enter a building. What really caught my attention is the thick layer of ice on roads, including at crosswalks. It's clear that they aren't using much road salt here, if any. I guess that is probably for environmental reasons.
Salt doesn't keep roads ice free when it gets too cold, it works in warmer climates but in Sweden it gets cold enough that you will have ice patches anyway. They would stay a shorter period, but they would still be there, so cars still need winter tires so they can drive on ice anyway, so can just as well not put toxic salt on the roads.
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.
Salt (and various substances alike) causes bad corrosion in vehicles. And quite often salt helps dissolve the snow yet what remains is a sludge, which in my opinion is much worse than a pedestrian path of packed snow. I wish more countries would choose the Scandinavian way of handling snow instead of just dumping tons of salt on the roads.
Sadly that seems to be the norm in Scandinavia. Oslo has the same problem (although they don't even try to prioritize sidewalks). They simply plow the bulk of the snow off the sidewalks and they might lay down gravel. It leaves significant slick spots and really you're just counting down the days until you take a tumble.
There are ways to walk on that without needing to worry. If you grow up in Scandinavia, at least in the north, you might go years without so much as slipping.
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.
Get the spikes. I'm not sure there's any 'trick' that's learnable without growing up there.
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.
The remains of the latest snowfall in Stockholm is worse than it usually is. Dunno how that happened, perhaps there was rain on cold streets and not just snow.
The video is more about gender equality than snow clearance, and I recommend it.
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".)
"Three times as many people are injured while walking in icy conditions in Sweden than while driving."
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?
They did look at the statistics and the statistics say women are more likely to be injured because they are more likely to walk.
"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.
>>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.
Yeah, there's a lot of adaptation to local norms. We don't have much snow-clearing equipment because it's so rarely needed (and no-one wants to pay taxes to have it just on the off-chance). Scotland does better because they have more.
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.
We once flew from Stockholm to London to conduct some user interviews. And it was snowing in London and it was exactly like you described. Half our interviews got cancelled, everyone was panicking because of the weather, chaos everywhere. We just laugh!
Well, counterpoint, is it really worth putting in place all the infrastructure and planning for the relatively few days it's frosty? Maybe it's more economical to just take the hit of the days off.
You're absolutely right, but I see that the infrastructure exists - the roads in winter are regularly salted, any snowfall is cleared immediately(at least in cities), and yet the entire country is still at a standstill, because....people are worried to go out? Like, if there was a foot of snow outside and it wasn't getting cleared because it's such a rare occurance that the city never bought any equipment for it - fair enough. But I see that local councils are equiped to deal with it, but some remaining caution remains, I don't know if it's a cultural thing or just a habit, I don't know.
Probably, people cleared the roads first (here in Canada this is at 4am typically, and again and again if it is still snowing). Then, as clearing the roads throws snow large volumes of and such everywhere, later the sidewalk clearers show up.
So now they probably just had the sidewalk clearers start work earlier, and clean an extra time, problem seemingly solved.
That seems like a very reasonable interpretation. I would add that they had. preference for making the roads safe because the roads have thousand pound death machines, and later increased the safety actions to improve the lives of people who might fall down. It was very weird to toss gender in, but this is the 2020s I guess.
> 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?
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.
Because it's a needlessly divisive way to frame things? If you make something women-vs-men, you're nudging people to think of it in a zero-sum, us-against-them way. If you talk about fairness for everyone, you encourage those who are currently better off to support it, because you're reassuring them that if and when they're worse off, they will also be supported.
Needlessly divisive?? It's literally one of the central issues guiding the project. Also, your last point makes no sense. Reassuring people that they'll be supported down the line as well, is a good thing.
Why does it matter if it is women and not men slipping on the sideways, and not just people? What if they now would find more men than women get injured because the roads are not cleared fast enough? Would they then reverse their decision? Or would women somehow still count more? Or what if the initial "analysis" would have found more people slipping on the sidewalks, but most of them being men?
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.
My impression was that roads were cleared first because snowplows and snowblowers would push snow to the side and it made sense to clear the sidewalk after the roads. Good on Sweden for challenging assumptions though. Especially because cities in Europe have vastly different car vs pedestrian balances than the US.
In the US (or at least in the Northeast) it's the responsibility of the people who live in those buildings or who own the commercial buildings to clean the sidewalks of snow.
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.
This is how it works in Sweden too. The house owner is most of the time responsible for the snow on the walkway outside their house. The city will often clear it off if you call and ask for help but you will have to wait until everything else is done.
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 don't understand the dichotomy here - don't you use different equipment to clear the sidewalks than you use to clean the roads? Sidewalks are usually too small for street size plows.
I live in London where snow is not really a thing. However, when I visited New York (after a major snow storm) I was really surprised by how little effort was made to make the sidewalk passable. In fact, the snow from the road was often piled 6ft high on the sidewalk.
Perhaps this is why it's notable for a large percentage of the HN audience?
maybe, but you better pay what it costs. For snows of 15cm or so you can plow whenever, but anytime there is around 50cm you need to keep everything plowed during the storm no matter how much equipment and manpower it takes, otherwise you fall far enough behind you can't plow and need equipment for mining to clear the snow, at great expense. If even once in 10 years a snowfall expected to be 10cm turns into 60cm you will more than make up all the costs of just treating every snow fall as 60cm expected.
I have no knowledge about snowplowing and I was just guessing that the cost of labor could be a factor. "Low-paying" jobs pay a lot better in Scandinavia than most other places. Most (basically all) people are payed a living wage from a single full time (37-40 hours) job. I don't even know if being a snow-plow driver is a "low-paying" job, and I would guess that those who drive the plows have other tasks as well.
I too know nothing about Sweden. In the US snow plowing for the public roads is fairly well paying. You do road repair in summer, and in winter plow snow.
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)
Since they are prioritizing and doing one before the other, I would guess that either they need the same people or the same machines to do it. I would expect different machines for the two tasks. So it must be people? Right?
Anyway, I think their priorities are very sensible.
Different machine and different people both. There is no way around the fact that you need a lot of people to keep up with the snowfall, and falling behind is a lot more expensive in the long run.
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)
But they do prioritize ofcourse, you can't plow everything at once. It's usually fixed within the day of the snowfall unless it's a bad snowstorm when it can take up to a couple of days until everything is done. Like we had several of last year.
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.
It will be interesting to see the higher order long term effects of the policy. For example if snow plow drivers (men?) typically reach their vehicles by car they may only start their work delayed due to slower traffic. So it could be a net negative.
“in addition to being objectively fairer.”
Changing priorities is fine. But don’t be disingenuous. Prioritizing women over men is not “objectively fairer.”
Such a misleading post linking to opinion pieces... you know very well that the first one was just ASKING why some high traffic streets in Stockholm had to be closed, with some people obviously trying to blame the recent prioritization changes but that by no means being unequivocaly the cause (IMO it was just more snow than the system was prepared to handle).
In the snow removal work, we prioritize high-capacity methods of transport, that is:
* walk
* bike
* public transport.
"High capacity" here may be misleading... in Stockholm, most people move around by foot or bycicle... that's why "walk" and "bike" are the first items listed. Just like it was shown in the video.
I linked the articles to point out that its not just me who is talking about this, and not just in one place.
I distinctly remember there being a massive increase in quantity of people needing hospital care but I didn't talk about it because I could not find the article for it, I also remember a local politician apologizing on implementing the reprioritization, but also could not find the article on it so left it un mentioned.
I'm pretty sure the entire thing in its original form was removed and re-evaluated after the disaster that was 2016 winter as Stockholm has not had these since, and I haven't seen any media Finnish, norwegian or swedish that would be gushing on how good the "gender neutral snowplowing" is, instead there was just silence as it was a terrible idea never to return.
The page you have linked talks in length about how and when things get cleared and is similar to Helsinki in that areas with "High capacity" aka lots of traffic get cleared first, which has very little in common if with the original video used in the article if you go and check it again, which does not seem to understand even basic logistics.
Ye this is one of these policies that are so bad that they are not followed to the letter by the people on the ground, so you never realize how bad they really are.
What use are clearing bus stops if the drivers can't get to the bus garage in the first place, etc.
> 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.
> 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?
Because the whole point of the article is that a task force dedicated to finding policies that disproportionately affected one gender was the one that discovered the problem. It otherwise may have never been found.
The point being that such task forces are beneficial and policy changes addressing such imbalances often end up benefiting everyone.
Bingo. Men/women, breadwinners/household labour and a few other axis tend to use a city much differently. By collecting the data that force was able to find gaps that were already existing in current structure and underlying assumptions about how it's used. Similar studies have found that most city planning is done around an able bodied cishetero men working typical hours and amenities to outsiders of that group tend to be applied patchwork after the fact which leads to a ton of troubles simply trying to get around.
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!
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.