Does the photo above look familiar to you? Have you seen something similar?
We are fortunate in Long Branch that the City provides snow plowing during the winter to help make walking on Long Branch sidewalks safer for everyone.
However, over the past few years, Long Branch residents are seeing damage to the City-owned boulevards, where the sidewalk plows have gouged out swathes of turf from the boulevards. And the same thing is happening on the front yards adjacent to the sidewalks.
The winter of 2022-2023 was probably the most egregious example. The damage seemed more widespread and more severe than ever.
The City claims to have a fleet of 300 sidewalk snow plows, but our understanding is that plowing outside of downtown Toronto is handled by a joint-venture contractor as part of a $1 Billion contract.
Technically, homeowners aren’t on the hook to repair damage caused to yards and boulevards by sidewalk plows because these areas are owned by the City. However, most homeowners look after these areas as if they were their own property and take great pride in doing so. After all, a well-maintained yard is pleasing to the eye.
The cause of the damage is related to the equipment selected to do the plowing. In most of Long Branch, sidewalks are 48 inches wide. The apparent width of the plows is 60 inches wide. This means the plows will gouge out a 12-inch wide swathe on one side of the sidewalk or the other.
In the left hand photo above, you can see the fibre optic cable exposed and cut. (Rogers was too cheap to install cable with a protective conduit and buried the cable only an inch or so below ground level). The right had photo shows a retaining wall that was pushed about 2 feet by the sidewalk plow.
The City’s “solution” to this problem is to scatter grass seed over damaged areas of boulevards to re-grow the turf there. Then, when winter comes, those same areas get gouged again and, in spring, the City sows grass seed again. There’s an excellent article in the January18th edition of The Toronto Star that discussed this issue and why the damage seems worse than in previous years.
I submitted a complaint to 311 for the damage in front of our house. I received only an acknowledgement that I’d submitted a complaint. No other response.
I wrote to our City Councillor, Amber Morley, with the above photos and more. I received no acknowledgement or response. No phone call from one of her staff. And no visit from a staff member, even though I extended an invitation to see the damage first hand. Not impressed!!!
All that happened was – you guessed it – a crew eventually came around to spread a meagre amount of topsoil over the damage and throw some grass seed onto this. Despite all the rain we received recently, there are no signs the grass seed is germinating.
We get that maybe the selection of plow widths is limited (though we seriously doubt that’s the case). So, if the only equipment available is 60″ wide, it would make sense to update the sidewalks to be 60″ wide. That would mean taking up some of the boulevard, the adjacent front yards or both. But we don’t think residents would really complain about new sidewalks that we even and easier to walk on. Some of the sidewalks in Long Branch had cracked and heaving paving slabs that created tripping hazards.
A few years ago – pre-COVID – the City undertook a major project to replace curbs, sidewalks and re-pave streets in the western section of Long Branch where I live. This covered the north-south streets from Fortieth to Thirty Fifth as well as the cross streets. The curbs were removed and replaced. The streets were stripped and re-paved. However, the City only replaced damaged sidewalk slabs, meaing they kept the width of the sidewalk at its original 48″. On three streets, Fortieth, Thirty Ninth and Thirty Fifth, they replaced the entire sidewalks and replaced them with 60″ wide sidewalks. Why not standardize on all streets?
Why can’t this city get its act together?
The street renewal project described above could best be described as a cosmetic treatment. We’ve had numerous watermain breaks and sinkholes – signs of the aging infrastructure beneath our streets. The City replaced water mains (and sewers as well, I believe) on Thirty Fifth Street but not on other streets in our portion of Long Branch. Less than one year after this project, we had a major watermain break near the Tim Horton’s at Thirty Eighth and Lakeshore – one that literally lifted the roadbed over a foot and that had water spraying out of the asphalt. We had a couple of sinkholes on our street. It took the City nearly a year to repair them. Their idea was to put a traffic cone on the sinkhole.
While it would be an inconvenience to put up with the process of replacing water mains, we believe most residents would recognize it as a long-term investment. Plus, if you’re planning to replace the roadbed, it would be less costly, in the long run, to do the extra work to replace water mains and sewers so the newly paved streets will stay pristine longer.
What You Can Do
Write to our Councillor, Amber Morley, to let her know how you feel about this issue. It doesn’t look like she will take action until she sees how widespread this issue is and how we deel about it.
