At first, working on this column, I kept striking out. I drove around Syracuse on Friday and Saturday, looking for travelers on foot willing to speak on-the-record about being forced by unplowed city sidewalks to take long, risky and nerve-racking walks in the traffic lanes of busy streets and aven ues. I found plenty of people willing to talk, but only if I agreed not to use their names. One guy was pushed into walking in the street at a frightening spot where the sidewalks ought to be plowed right away after every storm: The South Geddes Street railroad viaduct, sidewalks as of Friday blocked with snow on both sides of the street. The viaduct is a vital funnel for many pedestrians, since the tracks cut off other nearby routes for going north and south. It is used by parents taking little kids to school, or people on foot going to work, or countless others without cars who have no option — when the sidewalks are unplowed — except for walking in a high-stress corridor packed with three lanes of heavy traffic, with absolutely no safe buffer for those walking in the street. “Isn’t there supposed to be a machine for this?” the guy said to me, speaking of all the snow blocking the sidewalk. I had hurried down the slope to meet him just after he walked beneath the railroad bridges, both of us standing in the street, so close to passing cars that they sprayed slush on us as they went past — which is why he was less interested in an interview and far more focused on getting quickly and safely to an Arby’s parking lot on Erie Boulevard, where he could catch his breath. There was another man, toting grocery bags on West Genesee Street, who had no way to stay on the sidewalk at such spots as a blocked crosswalk at Genesee and West Fayette — a tangle of roads and medians designed decades ago by long-forgotten engineers, focused on making life more convenient for drivers, and clearly not so worried about the hazards pedestrians would face. Nightmare for pedestrians: Snow-blocked sidewalks along the South Geddes Street railroad viaduct – forcing pedestrians into three lanes of tight, swift traffic. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current “Unavoidable,” the man said of dodging traffic in the street. His anxiety was shared by a mom fiercely clutching the hand of her young son. They had no alternative except for walking in busy South Geddes Street, where the sidewalks near the Grand Avenue intersection were another impassable nightmare for anyone on foot or using a motorized wheelchair, risks accelerated by what seems like all too many angry and impatient drivers. “It’s been like this for centuries,” said the woman, who told me no thanks about seeing her name in my column. From there, I went looking for quotes at such maddening spots as a Newell Street bridge over Onondaga Creek — on the same street as two South Side elementary schools — where both sidewalks were utterly blocked Sunday with snow, and the only way across the bridge was by walking in the road. My problem in finding an on-the-record voice was resoundingly solved, however, on West Onondaga Street, where I noticed how snow-covered sidewalks had forced a woman to stand behind a parked van for protection against traffic as she waited in the street for a Centro bus. An unwalkable set of crosswalks Friday, at West Genesee Street and West Fayette Street, Syracuse. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current This was Brenda Mims, kitchen supervisor at the Samaritan Center on the North Side, which is where she was headed once she climbed onto the bus. She has done that work for 28 years, and it is fair to say she is a humanitarian legend in Syracuse — even if she would insist that praise is overblown. Mims, 67, had absolutely no hesitation in offering her thoughts on the condition of city sidewalks this winter: Doug Henry, co-owner of JSK Snow Services: To catch up on unplowed sidewalks in Syracuse, he has six sidewalk plows “running like a pack.” Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current “It puts me in a tizzy,” she said. Bad enough that she ends up walking in the street on her way to the bus stop — a bus stop so packed with snow that she has no choice except for standing in the street. She told me she was particularly frustrated by a sidewalk outside a boarded-up building on North State Street, just beyond the Samaritan Center. The organization serves countless people who are hungry. Mims said many of these guests have disabilities. Some use wheelchairs or walk with canes. For them, unplowed sidewalks become dangerous and frustrating obstacles. Mims understands. She had surgery that put a metal rod in her heel. She also has two torn tendons in her foot. Snow-covered sidewalks, to her, are not some minor inconvenience. She was most worried about the situation for the people she serves as they come and go just down the street from the Samaritan Center, where we met again later that day. She waded into deep snow on the unplowed sidewalk, demonstrating how treacherous it is to even attempt to walk on that rutted, icy and uneven stretch. “This is ridiculous,” she said, wobbling as she tried to stand on all the ice and snow. What makes it particularly disappointing, she said, is how much the situation changed for the worse this winter. In recent years, Mims noted, Syracuse sidewalks had been a whole lot better after heavy snow, at least compared to how they were before the city finally implemented a sidewalk plowing program in 2019. The Onondaga Creek bridge Sunday, a few blocks west of the McKinley-Brighton school, two blocks east of the Citizenship Science Academy elementary charter school: As of Sunday afternoon, buried sidewalks made it unwalkable without going into the street. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current This winter, the 127.7 inches of total snow that had fallen as of Sunday — with many weeks of potential snowfall yet to come — already matches the entire annual seasonal average for Syracuse, said National Weather Service meteorologist Ema Sera, who also said we have had snow cover on the ground for about a solid month. In other words, as Mims noted, sidewalk plowing seems to have fallen apart this winter, at a time when the nation’s snowiest large city is experiencing particularly harsh conditions and thus needs quality service the most. City leaders acknowledge the point. Last week, they fired Kimble and Kimble — a company that put in the low bid for the sidewalk plowing contract before this season. The city quickly rehired JSK Snow Services of Warners, which had held the contract since the program began. The fee will be $44,000 for every plowing run — about $6,000 more per run than under JSK’s last three-year contract, said co-owner Doug Henry, who said the increased costs are due to the growing expense of the plows his company uses in the city. Henry and his crews started plowing sidewalks at 2 a.m. Sunday, clearing 38 miles in eight hours of work. Typically, Henry said, his six sidewalk plows — designed specially for plowing city sidewalks — can cover the 180 city miles mandated by municipal contract in a single day, because that usually means dealing with fresh snow that is easy to move. This time, the intense cold and sheer volume of unmoved and frozen snow will stretch out the job into deep in the week. The snow is packed high and often “as hard as concrete,” Henry said. As I witnessed on Sunday, his plows occasionally need to push through mountains of snow – eight or nine feet high – dumped on sidewalks by some private plow operators who clear commercial parking lots and give no thought to how burying nearby sidewalks will affect pedestrians. A wall of hardened snow, almost four feet high, blocks a Lodi Street sidewalk Sunday before sidewalk plows arrived. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current “We’re running as a pack,” Henry said, meaning it is a combined effort for all his crews. He said a lead snowplow clears a sidewalk, another plow clears the snow that collapses on the sidewalk after the first one passes, and another plow clears the snow out of intersections after the first two plows push through walls of snow and ice — left behind by city street plows — that are blocking crosswalks. In a statement from City Hall, senior public information officer Sol Muñoz, spokeswoman for Mayor Sharon Owens, said JSK will clear “priority (sidewalk) routes” for the remainder of the winter. Muñoz also asked residents to continue clearing snow and ice from sidewalks near their homes, including street corners, since the city program has limitations. Looking back, it took many decades of passionate lobbying by pedestrians and their advocates before the city, during the Walsh administration, finally embraced a sidewalk clearing program. And I am certainly glad City Hall is correcting what amounted this winter to a debacle for people on foot. If you need evidence of just how bad it is, take a look at some of the photos I include with this piece. A plow from JSK Snow Services opens up a sidewalk Sunday on Lodi Street. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current My thought: As the Owens administration gets rolling, why not take the entire sidewalk-clearing initiative to another level? In a city with thousands of vacant properties and vacant lots, there is no practical way that homeowners alone can keep neighborhood sidewalks clear — particularly in neighborhoods of economic struggle, where people are most likely to walk to school, or to work, or to the store, or to a doctor. Considering their needs, it seems like the obvious next step is simply this: The nation’s snowiest large city ought to have a particularly visionary program for helping people who travel by foot or wheelchair, and thus need access to clear sidewalks. Other communities with similar problems ought to be able to look toward Syracuse as a model — which would mean taking the existing program for plowing sidewalks and adding imaginative elements to make it more far-reaching and responsive. For instance: Why not create a specifically dedicated civic sidewalk clearinghouse where residents could easily report problems — if there is a stretch where, say, schoolchildren are getting forced into the road because the sidewalks are not cleared, or a neighborhood or commercial district where mounds of snow from private plowing jobs are blocking city sidewalks? A guy named Jimmy, moments after a sidewalk plow cleared a path on Lodi Street, takes advantage – finally – of an open trail. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current Beyond that, why not work with neighborhood associations and community groups to come up with some efficient and established way of clearing out street corners — particularly those bordered by vacant properties — where city snowplows, passing by, have left walls of snow, making it all but impossible for people on foot to get back onto the sidewalk after crossing the street? Trust me on this: As a runner, traveling city streets in Syracuse, I see a staggering number of corners where access to the sidewalks is basically blocked off. Sunday, Henry’s plows roared along Lodi Street, opening the sidewalks — including one spot where a four-foot wall of frozen slush made passage impossible for any pedestrians. Once the plows had knocked down that massive barricade, a guy who had been forced to walk in the street moved up quickly to make use of the newly cleared trail. I introduced myself, and he told me his name was Jimmy. He said it has been a particularly hard winter to try and walk around this city. When I asked if it was a relief to again walk on an open sidewalk, he raised his eyebrows with an expression of are-you-kidding-me disbelief and said simply and emphatically: Yeah, man. He spoke for thousands in Syracuse who live their daily lives without a car, and find themselves walking every day on the side of slick and dangerous streets. It brought me back to a question asked out loud by Mims, who was thinking of what many Samaritan Center guests encounter in this fierce winter — even as she wondered in a larger way about civic priorities: “What about all of us people who have to walk?”    The post Sean Kirst: In nation’s snowiest large city, snow-blocked sidewalks, one hard winter and the needs of those on foot appeared first on Central Current. ...read more read less