A recent report aimed at improving the lives of Concord’s pedestrians recommends the city rethink its roads-first policy that leaves almost all sidewalk plowing until after the streets are clear.
If crews plowed some critical sidewalks during the storm – in addition to the immediate downtown area – and spent overtime to clear school routes on weekends, it would be a boon for safety and accessibility in the capital city, the draft Pedestrian Master Plan says.
But City Manager Tom Aspell said Concord already maintains its sidewalks better than any other city in New England. Could it be improved? Sure. But it becomes a question of how much taxpayers want to spend to do the job.
“I’ve gone around to every major city and every minor city in Northern New England and Massachusetts. Nobody can compare to the way we remove snow from sidewalks,” Aspell said. “Whether it’s Montpelier or Portsmouth, Berlin or Boston, Newburyport, doesn’t matter. Ours are always the best.”
During a snowstorm, the city sends out a fleet of plows to tackle 220 miles of roadways. Except for downtown, which has its own dedicated team and equipment working while the snow falls, no sidewalks will be touched until the roads are clear.
That’s partly out of necessity, General Services Director Chip Chesley said, because road plows interfere with sidewalks.
“The snow from the street goes onto the sidewalk and then from the sidewalk it goes onto your front yard or someplace else,” he said. “Ultimately we’re a community that heavily depends on the automobile for travel. By definition, that has to take priority.”
Even if the sidewalks come second, the ones the city prioritizes are still addressed in a timely fashion, when the storm falls during the week. After last week’s nor’easter died out overnight Thursday, Chesley deployed a team of eight sidewalk plows at 6:30 a.m. Friday. He said he hoped to have all the school routes cleared by 4 p.m.
“By nature, I want us to be the best, and I’m hard pressed to point to another community in Northern New England that rebounds as quickly as Concord,” Chesley said.
Concord took steps in two areas over the past decade to make a marked improvement in its sidewalk plowing, Aspell said.
First, when the school district consolidated, the city prioritized maintenance of sidewalks along all the routes that children use to walk to school.
The council also used surplus dollars to buy new sidewalk tractors, Aspell said, allowing more of the city’s 90 miles of sidewalks to be plowed sooner without boosting staff.
“Just the fact that you had a vehicle that didn’t break down every three to five hours made us that much more efficient,” he said.
Second, in conjunction with the Main Street Project, the city created a dedicated team to focus on the downtown sidewalks, which increased in width from 8 to 18 feet in some places.
“The sidewalks require a lot more hand maintenance . . . so we ended up creating the downtown services team related to that and bought them special equipment to be able to do it,” Aspell said. “You see that when you go downtown now. They keep the sidewalks open even better than we did before, which was pretty good.”
The sum of those improvements was that the city became easily the best in New England at clearing its sidewalks of snow, Aspell said. Chesley said the question becomes whether taxpayers are willing to pay more to score a few more points.
“It’s a balance between expenditures and really running up the score on being the best,” he said. “We’re faced with a number of competing needs, and I think the council has tough decisions to make.”
Still, when the committee that drafted the Pedestrian Master Plan met with walkers over the past year and a half, sidewalk maintenance stood out as “clearly an important issue to many residents,” according to the plan.
Residents said they appreciated the focus on downtown and school routes, but also identified other areas that could use more attention; for instance, the only walking path between East Concord and downtown is frequently inaccessible and dangerous, especially at the area where Loudon Road interacts with Interstate 93’s Exit 14.
That area could benefit from mid-storm plowing, the same as downtown, and better follow-up to ensure it doesn’t become encrusted in ice, the plan recommends.
Weekend storms can be problematic, too, the report says, because the city doesn’t use overtime for sidewalk clearing.
Robert Baker, a member of committee that drafted the plan, said even if Concord stands out against comparable cities nearby, there’s room for improvement.
He said, for instance, if the city built its streets with planting strips to separate pedestrians from traffic, the space could accommodate trees for aesthetics and snow plowed from the road without impeding sidewalks.
Contrary to the officials’ brags about snow removal, Baker pointed to a nationwide study of “complete streets” policies that found Concord’s to be the worst among comparable cities that had a policy.
The “complete streets” policy deals with far more than snow removal, but Baker said it shows the city’s leadership can do more on behalf of walkers and bicyclists. A master plan alone doesn’t mean anything, he said.
“I think the Pedestrian Master Plan could just sit on a shelf and be ignored, unless leadership says this is important,” he said.
(Nick Reid can be reached at 369-3325, nreid@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @NickBReid.)