Bad City Planning Plus Severe Winter Weather Equals a Recipe For Disaster

Hello and welcome! So I’m aware that it is February 9th, and technically, spring is only a mere six weeks away. However, here where I live in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, we are in a period of heavy winter. Usually our snow fully melts by the end of April.

I am writing this blog on January 6th, 2026 and I experienced many frustrations on Monday the 7th as I was driving my kids back and forth to school for the day.

So first off - a little background: I have two kids in school. One in grade six who attends a full day and one in kindergarten, which is less than half a day. I take my kids to school in the morning at the same time, I pick up my daughter before lunch and then my son again in the afternoon.

Also, last summer, the city of Edmonton decided that our neighborhood (one of many I’m assuming) needed an upgrade. They are attempting this initiative to turn our city into a “walking city” where they are trying to limit the number of vehicles that are driven. They are making the roads smaller and the parks and sidewalks bigger to accommodate and push less vehicle traffic and more walking/public transportation.

They let people “vote” on this initiative in the neighborhood, but it still went through despite many people voting negatively. Not only do we now have larger sidewalks to shovel (they have doubled in size), but they also are charging us $2000 on our property taxes (per property) for just the sidewalk.

So, the entire summer of 2025, our front road was shut down and they reduced it in size to take away all the street parking. The only available road are two lanes, each side with opposite lanes of traffic.

On top of this, we live across from a school, so as you can imagine, this has drastically impacted where the parents can drop off their kids. They have limited the area so only maybe 7 cars can park for drop-off at any given time.

So anyone without a back parking pad or garage has to park on a side street where you can no longer see your vehicle. We also have high vehicle theft and break ins in our area. Before, when I couldn't park in the garage, I had my vehicle broken into four separate times, one involving an insurance claim for over $4000.00! We are lucky however, since we have a single garage as well as a double parking pad.

Now, for the problems…

It has snowed a lot over the course of the last two weeks. According to the city of Edmonton, they do not have the budget to increase the number of ploughs or trucks for the city. According to the news, when it snows, they need to continuously go back and do the main arteries each time, so they never get to the residential areas. In all the years I have been alive (43!) I have never seen it this bad, and I have been driving since I was 18 years old.

The road conditions along with the decreased thoroughfare means that a bus and a car cannot pass each other at the same time without damaging one another. When I was coming home Monday, it took me 15 minutes to traverse 1/8th of a city block in my car!

At this time, I’m not even talking about the windrows that have developed from previous ploughs. This is simply from the edges of the snow piling up by the sidewalk from the edges of the plough as it goes by. They usually don’t clean those up until spring time. These prevent parking on a road when parking is available.

So not only are there no current parking spaces on the road side, there are also no spots even when parking is available - this is due to the deep snow that the city is not clearing in a timely fashion.

On all residential roads in my neighborhood and surrounding neighborhoods, the roads have deep ruts. The ones that are softer from more traffic, it makes it difficult to drive and walk anywhere.

I would really like to know what the city was thinking when they designed this new system. Honestly, what did they expect to happen? On top of all this, the areas where cars now park is very limited and they park near road exits, making it very dangerous as well. You are technically supposed to park so many metres away from any driveway or entrance/exit, but no one is able to due to lack of room. So when the city decides to put up no parking signs to blade the side roads, now where is everyone expected to park?

Thank you for reading my frustrations at our current predicament. Do you have anything in your city (either designed by your government, or city, or something else entirely) that really bothers you?

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you again next week!

Sandra