As the Capital Region lay paralyzed by snow this week, a number of photos made the rounds of social media showing beautifully cleared bike lanes laying directly alongside treacherous roadways still piled with ice and snow.

"Bike lanes perfect. Roads ... not so much," wrote one widely circulated post on the Facebook page of Virgin Radio Victoria.

It’s not a complaint unique to Victoria. In Vancouver, Toronto and even Edmonton, the immediate hours after snowfalls all seem to yield maddening images of empty but snow-free bike lanes coursing their way through landscapes of impassable roadways and sidewalks.

“The sidewalks and roads are disastrous but instead you plow the bike lanes!?” wrote one typical Victoria critic in a Wednesday Twitter post.

The explanation for the apparent disparity isn’t due to any cycle supremacy in plow schedules. Neither is the city prioritizing bike lanes ahead of more critical infrastructure such as emergency routes or main arteries. Rather, it comes down to an issue of equipment and differentials in coverage area.

Ok @lisahelps @CityOfVictoria what the hell is this!? The sidewalks and roads are disastrous but instead you plow the bike lanes!? No one's biking in this. Now I have to worry about my wife, and children's safety because the road and walking conditions are dangerous. #VoteNoHelps pic.twitter.com/bGksCEN1Er — Craigy A (@JaJaFett) January 15, 2020

The machine used to clear snow from Victoria’s separated bike lanes is a Bobcat compact loader fitted with a rotating brush attachment. The brush spends most of the year as a street cleaner, but during snowfalls does double duty as an ersatz snowblower.

When snow hits the City of Victoria, the immediate priority for the Bobcat is to clear pedestrian approaches to the Johnson Street Bridge, explained the city’s director of public works, Fraser Work, in a conversation with The Capital. Then, the machine is directed to clear the several kilometres of the city’s separated bike lane network.

The Bobcat, with rotating brush attachment, that is used to clear Victoria's bike lanes (Courtesy of the City of Victoria).

Completing both tasks can take as little as an hour, and once complete the machine drops its rotating brush attachment, picks up a bucket attachment and begins doing detail work on snow removal, such as clearing accumulated snow from parkades or high-traffic intersections. On snow days, the Bobcat will actually spend the vast majority of its time as a conventional front-loader for piled snow, rather than in its rotating brush configuration.

Sitting in Royal Jubilee Hospital after following the ambulance carrying my sister. Wondering why @CityOfVictoria has bike lanes cleared but roadways are a skating rink in areas — Jamie Joslin (@BohemianChicArt) January 16, 2020 ‍

The machine is too small and underpowered to plow city streets with its brush attachment. With a width of only about one metre, it would need up to three passes to clear a single two-lane road. The brush attachment is also much slower and more disruptive than a plow: Snow is blasted away, rather than swiftly pushed to the side as with a plow. It’s fine for setting a narrow track through a limited bike lane network, but it would be catastrophically slow in clearing any meaningful portion of Victoria’s 258 total kilometres of asphalt roadway.

"You can't allocate that resource to larger jobs," said Work.

