Does Seattle have too many snowplows?

A SDOT plow clears East Denny Way in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. A SDOT plow clears East Denny Way in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Photo: Joshua Trujillo, Seattlepi.com Photo: Joshua Trujillo, Seattlepi.com Image 1 of / 6 Caption Close Does Seattle have too many snowplows? 1 / 6 Back to Gallery

Seattle has, if anything, too many snowplows for its land area and the amount of snow it gets, according to a new report.

It's counterintuitive, considering the Emerald City's reputation for complete ineptitude when the white stuff falls.

The Atlantic, which looked into the issue, pointed to Seattle's less-than-stellar handing of the December 2008 storm. That snow response contributed to Mayor Greg Nickels' loss in the next primary election, and subsequently, the resignation of Seattle DOT head Grace Crunican.

These days, The Atlantic wrote: "The city is better prepared for another long-shot storm, but it's not prepared like Chicago is. That just wouldn't make sense."

Indeed, The Atlantic's numbers show Chicago has more than six times as many snow plows per square mile as Seattle does. But Chicago gets more than five times as much snow. When you divide the total snowfall by the plows per square mile, Seattle has just 14 percent less capacity to handle the snow it gets.

Do the same for all 18 cities The Atlantic reviewed and Seattle has the sixth-best capacity to handle its snow -- just behind Chicago, just above Toronto and five places ahead of snowy cross-state rival Spokane. Seattle has 20 percent less capacity for its snowfall than the average city but 39 percent more than the median (New York, Washington, D.C., and, to a lesser extent, Kansas City and Philadelphia have a relative bounty of plows for their snowfall, impacting the average).

In a big storm, Seattle's 30 plows focus on bus routes and park-and-ride lots, Steve Pratt, who directs the Street Maintenance Division of the Seattle Department of Transportation, told The Atlantic.

"The snow and ice response plan is built around getting people to use public transportation," he said in the story.

Given our geography here, we would have to have 100 trucks [to cover the whole city], and at $150,000 to $200,000 a truck, that would be a foolish waste of money because they would sit most of the time. And they would sit for five years because it doesn't snow that often. So we go with what we have.

The Atlantic didn't count non-plow equipment, such as salt trucks and snow blowers, private plows on retainer or non-street plows, such as Toronto's 322 for sidewalks and Boulder's two for bike paths.

I can't speak for Toronto, but I spent three years in Montreal, where fleets of plows work constantly clearing streets and sidewalks during storms, followed by machines that suck up the snow and shoot it into dump trucks that haul it away. That's a necessity in a city that averages 89 inches of snow a year, with high temperatures below freezing in December through February.

Perhaps the most-surprising thing to me was that Washington, D.C., is second to New York for capacity to plow the snow it gets. I lived there during its 1996 "Storm of the Century," and the city was paralyzed. Major streets remained unplowed for days, with cars abandoned randomly. Military Humvees were about the only thing on the road. Emergency officials sent out pleas for people to donate use of four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Has D.C. bought more plows since then? Actually, the city doesn't have any full-time plows, The Atlantic reported.

It has 120 6-wheel dump trucks that can be outfitted with heavy plows, and another hundred Ford F-550 trucks for local roads that convert into light plows. ... In a real bind, the city has a private company on retainer to clear the highways through town, and additional equipment on rental.

Still, it's better than Jackson, Miss., which gets one inch of snowfall per year and has no plows.

Visit seattlepi.com's home page for more Seattle news.