City Still Clearing 400 Miles Of Roads

PHILADELPHIA - Streets Commissioner Clarena Tolson joined The Five Spot on Friday to discuss Philly's road-clearing effort, strategy and complaints some motorists have been sharing with Fox 29.

Tolson said over 310 pieces of equipment are on the streets trying to clear them.

"Our goal is to make streets passable at this point," Tolson said. "We've had up to 45 inches of snow between these last two storms that have occurred very close to each other – a phenomenal amount of snow. Our goal is to have the streets passable so that cars could travel down them. They're not going to be cleared to the blacktop. It's just not possible given the amount of snow that we have, the temperatures that we have. We want to move quickly through the city as fast as possible given the conditions that we have. And I think, compared to what could have happened in our city, we're doing – we're right on target in terms of doing a good clearing of our city streets in terms of making them passable."

Of the more than 2,600 miles of city streets, Tolson said about 400 miles of streets remain to be taken care of.

Tolson said they do have a handful of huge front-end loaders and another 93 smaller backhoes that are working to move the snow, usually to corners, so they can get the streets open and passable.

"If we wanted to try to lift all of the snow out of our communities off of the street, move it someplace else, there's several issues at hand," Tolson said. "One, we've got to take it someplace. Two, you need the equipment to do that, and the fact is we probably have 600,000 loads of snow to remove. To do that would probably take us weeks. We think that would probably be unacceptable for most of our residents."

They are trying to remove some of the corner mounds as their work progresses.

The streets commissioner also addressed concerns about squeezed roads that have lanes still blocked by snow.

"We went through first, made a quick pass, getting it opened up at least so there'd be a lane. That's the initial goal," Tolson said. "But with time, we want to open up – we call pushing back – we want to make the streets wider, make it a little safer for two sets of cars to maneuver through the streets. So, with time, if people are patient with us, we're going to have more street access."