I spent a few months traveling to Montreal for work right before Covid hit, right in the middle of winter. I noticed that the sidewalks and streets stayed mostly clear of snow and now I know why. This fascinating article on the snow removal process in Montreal makes every other city’s efforts pale in comparison.

In Montreal, a blizzard is a call to action. With a budget of nearly $180 million and a staff of over 3,000 workers, the city is poised and prepared to manage and remove it all. Once snow begins accumulating, a multiphase operation begins to unfold across the city’s 19 boroughs. Between roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, the city clears over 10,000 km – roughly the distance between Montreal and Beijing.

Montreal doesn’t just push snow to the curb with plows – instead, snow is picked up by a fleet of trucks and transported up to one of 28 snow dump sites across the city. Throughout a typical winter, roughly 300,000 truckloads of snow are transported – a volume of about 12 million cubic meters.

Part of the snow removal process is available to view:

The whole article is a fun read. Montreal has massive snow mountains where snow is trucked to melt later and they use the old Francon quarry as a storage area as well –

The final site we visited was the crown jewel of Montreal’s snow storage strategy: the Francon quarry. In decades past, it provided the limestone that built Montreal’s posh downtown districts. And since its retirement, it has become the city’s largest snow dump.

This doesn’t mean Montreal’s snow removal is perfect though. On two of my trips to the city there was a large storm the day before I arrived and sidewalks were an absolute mess.