It's a question that can be heard in coffee shops, around water coolers and in office cubicles every time Mother Nature dumps snow or freezing rain on Anchorage: Why is so-and-so's neighborhood plowed or sanded while mine is not? And with snowfalls of up to a foot in places blanketing the Anchorage area over the past few days, it's a question sure to come up again. But contrary to popular belief, no Anchorage neighborhoods are picked to be the first cleared. There is a method to the maintenance.

Clearing roadways in Alaska's largest city can be a big challenge. The Municipality of Anchorage is responsible for maintaining about half of the road miles in Alaska's largest city. The state is on the hook for the rest. The reason? Anchorage is crisscrossed by municipal and state-owned roadways, with each government responsible for its own blacktop and gravel. For the Anchorage street maintenance department, that means clearing or sanding 76 million square feet of roads. How much snow is that? When one inch of snow falls on Anchorage's city-owned roads (6.3 million cubic feet of snow), it equals the volume of water that flows over Niagara Falls each minute.

There are three main roadway types in Anchorage: Arterial roads, collector roads and streets. Arteries, like Lake Otis Parkway, are high-traffic streets that connect to other major roadways and highways. Collector streets, such as 64th Avenue, are moderate traffic roads that allow people to travel to and from streets -- the smaller, lower-speed roads that snake through Anchorage's neighborhoods. The city begins by plowing or sanding the arteries and collector roads first. Then, its 30 graders get to work on transit system routes and roads bordering local schools that are used by students to walk to and from school. After that, the city begins clearing side streets. It rotates the start of road clearing from east to west, then west to east after each weather event.

The street maintenance department said that is the most efficient way to use manpower and equipment -- working an area collectively before moving on to the next neighborhood.

But people living in one area of town are never at the front of the street-clearing line.

"People in Midtown are almost always on the second day -- there's no way around that," Alan Czajkowski, Anchorage's deputy director of maintenance and operations. "It wouldn't make sense to start in the middle of town."

Typically, it takes eight to 10 hours to get to neighborhood streets. But like everything else when talking about snow removal or street sanding, the time it takes for city street maintenance workers to get to smaller roadways and trails depends on the mood of Old Man Winter.

"We will not start a plow-out or a basic residential plow-out until the primary roads are done. If it continues to snow we will work on those roads until we can keep them clear," Czajkowski said. That's what happened during a one-week period bridging November and December of 2011, when Anchorage was pelted with an average snowfall of 4 inches a day.

But it isn't just snow that keeps street crews busy. Early December's freezing rain, which forced the closure of local schools, drew a lot of attention from Anchorage street maintenance workers, and the work began even before the first frozen drop of water hit local pavement.

"We pre-treated a lot of roads -- especially on the Hillside -- with magnesium chloride, which prevents the ice from bonding with the road surface," Czajkowski said. In most places, especially on the country's East Coast, regular salt is used, but because of the proliferation of salmon streams in Anchorage, the city is not allowed to use it. Magnesium chloride is better for waterways, partly because the city doesn't have to use as much of it as regular salt, Czajkowski said.

After that, sanders -- trucks that spread sand on the roads for driver traction -- and graders were out. Special blades on the graders that cut grooves in the ice and snow were used to add as much traction as possible.