Officials to deploy forces where they're needed as a means to save

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Toronto roads will get all the snow clearing that's necessary, but not necessarily all the snow clearing they've received in the past.

That was the word from Toronto's top transportation official Gary Welsh Thursday, as the city officially launched the winter snow-ploughing season, which stretches from now until April 1, 2008.

Labouring under cost constraints, Welsh said the city will shave between $3 and $4 million off its $67-million snow-clearing budget, not by cutting any specific services but by being more intelligent about the way it deploys snow ploughs and road salters.

"Originally when cost containment was announced in the summer, we thought that we were going to hold back ploughing the sidewalks and driveway windrows as a cost-containment measure," said Welsh. "But the more we thought about it - the more we thought that there may be an opportunity here to not necessarily always deliver a harmonized level of service, because snow conditions do vary across the city."

In the past, whenever Toronto has been hit with a heavy enough snowfall, ploughs and salters were sent off in equal force across the whole city.

Now, Welsh said, city staff are paying closer attention to weather forecasts and reports from various divisions to determine just how serious the accumulation is in those areas.

Welsh said the new system should lead to a quicker and more efficient cleanup after big snow events, combining salting in areas where the snow is thin and ploughing where it piles up.

"We're almost going high-tech," he said, as the city begins to judge such factors as pavement temperature and hyper-localized weather forecasts.

So what can Torontonians expect?

"If there's a major snowstorm (15-centimetres and up), we're ploughing all the roads and all the sidewalks where we can, and we'll be opening up the driveway windrows where we can," he said. "In a medium-sized storm (10 to 15-centimetres), we'll plough all the roads, open up the sidewalks and driveways. In a minor storm (five to eight-centimetres) where it's not uniform we must decide whether to plough or not."