City of Chicago Snow and Ice Control Info
Snow and Ice Control
Winter 2009-2010
The presence of Streets & Sanitation's blue Snow Fighting Trucks plowing and salting city streets is an extremely familiar sight and a strong reminder that it is winter in Chicago. Streets & Sanitation coordinates Chicago's snow and ice control efforts from Snow Command located in the 911 Center on West Madison Street. This high tech command center allows us to make effective use of advanced technologies such as Doppler radar, Global Positioning Systems on all of our trucks, ground and pole mounted pavement sensors, access to a network of 1000 cameras, and communications with meteorologists and the National Weather Service.
Snow Command closely monitors incoming weather systems and deploys our main fleet of 274 Snow Fighting Trucks, or lesser numbers of trucks, depending upon need. Once on the roadways our trucks patrol, plow or salt our routes as necessary. When temperatures fall into the teens, our trucks often spray our road salt with calcium chloride to make the salt work more effectively at lower temperatures. We have also been making frequent use of more environmentally friendly deicers that are made with salt water, sugar beet byproducts and calcium chloride. When time and breaks in the weather permit we will apply this pretreatment to our bridge decks and overpasses to slow down the formation of ice on the driving surface.
Streets & Sanitation is responsible for maintaining winter roadway safety on a route system of 9,456 lane miles, the equivalent distance of going from Chicago and Canberra, Australia (9,387 miles). Our routes consist of city main streets, side streets and Lake Shore Drive. The expressway system that travels through Chicago is maintained by the State of Illinois' Department of Transportation, IDOT, and their familiar orange trucks.
In order to ensure that the most critical roadways in Chicago are kept open to full capacity at all times, the City of Chicago instituted and vigorously enforces a Winter Overnight Parking Ban on 107 miles of vital arterial streets from 3AM to 7AM between December 1st and April 1st, regardless of snow.
A separate season parking ban exists for another 500 miles of main streets when there is a at least two inches of snow on the street, not matter the time of day or the calendar date. Both of these parking bans were implemented to prevent recurrences of 1967 and 1979 when Chicago came to a traffic stand still due to major snowstorms. Motorists who ignore this permanently posted seasonal tow zone face a $150 towing fee (minimum) in addition to a $50 ticket and an initial $10 daily storage fee.
Whenever the arterial streets are deemed safe for travel during or after a snowfall, the city's salt trucks are dispatched to the secondary, residential streets for salting and plowing operations. This work continues until all city streets have been treated.
Chicago's narrowest side streets are cleaned by a fleet of 24 smaller plows. This is evenly divided between Snow Tigers, narrow plows with heavy salt capacity, and 4x4's which are pick up trucks with plows and a more modest salt capacity.
For major snowstorms, Streets and Sanitation also has the capacity to equip between 150 and 200 garbage trucks with "quick hitch" plows to supplement the fleet. Since these don't have salt spreading capability, they are run in tandem with trucks that do. In addition, heavy equipment and labor is available from other municipal departments for snow clearance during and after a blizzard. Chicago averages 39 inches of snow annually however we received more than 60 inches of snow during the Winter of 2007-2008 making it the snowiest winter in 30 years.