When city street furniture gets in the way of people and snowplows trying to clear the sidewalk, it’s in the wrong place.

The city gets a good selection of street furniture as part of its contract with Astral Out of Home, which provides it in exchange for the right to sell ads posted mainly on transit shelters.

Astral has been installing railings over the past year to which news boxes for free publications are attached, at TTC stops and busy street corners.

The railings, also called “corrals” by the city’s street furniture division, are sometimes poorly positioned, like one we wrote about on Jan. 12, at a bus stop on Danforth Ave., at Linsmore Cres.

Carly Hinks, who’s in charge of street furniture, told us her staff investigated and found it complied with the city’s Vibrant Streets guidelines on sufficient sidewalk space for pedestrians and transit access.

That may also be the case for a corral on the west side of St. George St., in front of the John P. Robarts Library, just north of Harbord St. But people trying to squeeze past it might disagree.

H. J. Cho emailed to say the railing was installed last summer, and that “I thought it was squeezed into an awkward place, where it potentially might interfere with pedestrian/wheelchair traffic.

“Sure enough, I guess the snow plow could not move through that tight space. The (overall) sidewalk space is huge, but somebody had to pick the worst spot for that post.”

We went there and noticed that the north end of the railing and news boxes is close to the south end of a raised planter that runs next to the sidewalk, creating a bottleneck for pedestrians.

The boxes and a snowbank next to them make it impossible for sidewalk snowplows to get by; the sidewalk has not been cleared, with only a narrow path trampled through it.

We could see tire tracks in the snow at both edges of the sidewalk, obviously left by a sidewalk plow. But they came to a stop a few metres away from the railing, as if the plow had to reverse and go back the way it came.

STATUS: We’ve sent a note to Hinks and Ron Hutchinson at Astral, asking if there’s anything that can be done to make it easier for people and plows to get through.

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