By all accounts , Boston is having one hell of a winter — no seriously , just look at that picture — which has reach the city manager some job , like there ’s no room left to put the coke . But it ’s not just Boston : keep metropolis running despite foot of snow is a job that ’s been bothering townspeople drawing card and urban planners for ten .
The two most common solution to dealing with snow are the chintzy : salting and ploughing . salt roadstead , usually with plain old sodium chloride , help oneself meliorate adhesive friction and lowers the freezing compass point of water well , down to 0 Farenheit under perfect conditions . cover snow ordinarily just means removing any built - up snow to the side of the roadway , which plainly helps , because it intend that there ’s relatively clear road to drive on .
But it can also create a job — if there ’s a big dump of snowfall , or any kind of serious accumulation over time , the hill of snow along the edge of the road become unmanageable . At best , you ’ll lose a lane along the sharpness of a engaged road ; at worst , all on - street parking vanishes , major roadway get clog up , and the road web stops function .
That ’s where snow removal come into play . It ’s a enormously expensive process from offset to finish , but in cities that see meters of snowfall per year , more or less the only option . It ’s a simple enough process : in the main , C is plowed into the center of the street ( often in the dead of night ) , then scooped up by a giant snowblower , and dump into a truck .
The hard part — the part that Boston is suffer trouble with — is dealing with those truckloads of snow . Some city habituate any useable public outer space , like parking lots — others have designated ‘ snow farms ’ where they make gargantuan piles , that often last well into the natural spring or early summer .
Once that space run out , more radical solutions have to be found . Some municipalities practice diesel motor - powered snow melters , which are expensive to buy and race , but at least render a guaranteed resolution ; others do what Boston is considering , namely plowing C into the ocean .
For those of you wondering why watercourse dumping is n’t the go - to solution , think about what ’s really in snow that ’s been turn off the route : copious amounts of saltiness , crude oil , and probably the end of a foolhardy bicycler . That foul the ocean , and so can only be done if the snow institute a danger to public health — a point Boston is rapidly approaching . [ BBC , Boston Globe , New York Times ]
Image credit : AP range of a function
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