New York – On Sunday, New York City experienced one of the biggest snowstorms in its history, but almost as soon New Yorkers took stock of their winter wonderland, they started doing what they do best: complaining.
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Just take a look at some of the comments on a New York Times blog about the supposedly slow pace of snow removal. “City has never been this disorganized!” went one complaint. “Mr. Mayor, do the residents of our neighborhood not contribute enough to the city’s productivity?” asked a furious Brooklyn resident.
A livery driver told the Associated Press, “Mayor Bloomberg, he’s a rich man, so he doesn’t care about the little people. . . . They always abandon Queens.”
But while the snow is frustrating, that frustration is being misdirected at City Hall. Having worked as an assistant sanitation commissioner and, later, the transportation commissioner, I know that the city is doing the best it can – in some of the toughest natural circumstances imaginable.
This was a particularly difficult storm to fight. Snow fell at a rate of 2 to 3 inches an hour, while winds gusted to as high as 80 mph. A Weather Channel announcer said that the barometric pressure measured in the eye of this storm was equivalent to a Category 2 hurricane.
Most streets would have to have been plowed more than once every hour just to maintain a minimum amount of clearance. With nearly 20,000 lane miles of streets and several hundred lane miles of highway, the city would need about 5,000 garbage trucks equipped with plows to clean each street every hour. But the city has fewer than 2,000 garbage trucks, so an average street would not be plowed for several hours after snow stopped falling.
Someone might wonder why the city doesn’t just purchase 3,000 more trucks. But to do that in anticipation of a snow emergency is not practical, since 2,000 is all the city needs to pick up the garbage.
Two factors further complicate the situation. One, not all streets are created equal. Roads to hospitals, firehouses and police stations take priority; main arteries like Queens Blvd.; the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn need more attention. That means less plowing on residential streets. The other is that the longer the time between plowings, the less effective each pass is. As snow piles up, the difficulty of moving it increases exponentially. Snow gets packed into ice as each vehicle passes, and wind replaces already plowed snow.
The public has been spoiled over the past 30 years: Starting with Mayor Ed Koch and Sanitation Commissioner Norman Steisel, we’ve had progressively better responses to big storms. In fact, we got too good at it. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was so proud of the city’s response that he publicly embarrassed the Port Authority for not doing as good of a job with the runways at local airports.
Steisel’s rule was that it would take a day of work to remove every 4 inches of snow. In 1983, the city was hit with a similar storm – about a 20-incher. Even though a healthier budget meant better-staffed city agencies, blacktop was still not seen in parts of the city for a full week.
The press and the public understood the dimensions of the storm and recognized those efforts. Today, we take to the blogs and the airwaves to complain.
Given the circumstances, we simply expected too much in the wake of Sunday’s snowfall. Storms of this size are hard to fight. Give the city at least until Thursday before you start complaining.
Riccio is a lecturer on management at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
PR at it’s best. Cut the garbage (pun not intended (sanitation). There is no reason that plows should be sitting unused in garages at times like this.
There is no need to debate the issues and numbers presented in th article nor by any other defenders of the Mayor.
Proof that all these excuses are not true, can be proven easily by the fact that, NY did not get any more snow, than all the other nearby cities, on the entire north-east coast, on the same day.
Whatever excuses could apply to NY, could or should apply to every other city within a few hundred miles of NY, (In the Entire Tri_State area, and beyond) yet no one else messed up as badly as Bloomberg did.
THIS ARTICLE MAKES NO SENSE,
IF IT TAKES 5000 TRUCK TO CLEAN EVERY ST. EVERY HR, THEN IT SHOULD TAKE 2000 TRUCKS APROX. 2 1/2 HRS TO CLEAN EVERY STREET. PS. THE SNOW HAS STOPPED APROX. 60 HRS AND EVERY STREET IN BORO PK HAS STILL NOT BEEN PLOWED, INCLUIDING 47 ST, WHICH IS A MAIN ST FROM FLATBUSH TO BORO PK
NYC residents are usually a pretty tough bunch and take a lot in stride. This snowstorm and the lack of a proper, timely clean-up have given us the right to complain. When the inaction of The DOS have created a situation where lives have been lost..we have the right to complain. I am complaining to those who say we haven’t the right to complain and because I expect that which our hard earned tax money is supposed to pay for and we haven’t received.
Compare this to the 96 blizzard, back then, by 24 hours after the start of the storm every street in the city has been plowed at least once, and now? We’re up to 72 hours after the start of the snowfall and there are streets in brooklyn that weren’t even touched!
Its a shame! And when a fish rots it starts from the head, so yeah, I blame the mayor.
Even if all these excuses, to excuse the Mayor, were correct, it still does not justify not increasing the number of snow-cleaning personnel and equipment because this is not about simple savings of dollars and sense and nor about some minor inconvenience for a few days.
This is a matter of National Security and the dept of Homeland Security should help pay for it because without an instant cleanup, the entire city is at risk in the event of a potential terror alert and no vehicles can come to anyone’s aid, never mind prevent the potential terror event, Chas Vesholom.
Besides, all of Obama’s economy stimulus packages are now all down the drain because the economic setback, as a result of the non-clean-up, which this city has now caused, affects the entire nation adversely.
Even only the JFK mess-up, is enough to push the entire nation back in to recession.
Let me guess. LUCIUS J. RICCIO had his street plowed at least once by the 3rd day.
In 19th ave station all the plows were their in front of the sanitation dept
They would never dare do it if the public shool would be opened
They have the resources to clean the streets.
They are angry at the cuts and not doing their work
The sanitation bosses should be fired
Ask this writter how much bloomberg paid him to write this stupit article… One thing the mayor knows well is pr for his mistakes.
excuses, excuses.. There wasnt a plow truck in sight in brooklyn the first 24 hours of the storm. They were not prepared, they were not ready, and bloomy didnt want to pay overtime prices to be ready.
For some reason theres way more than enough staff to cover giving parking tickets on every street in the 5 boroughs multiple times a day. There are enough tow trucks that if your parked illegally on any street to tow you. So there are staff to cover every inch of every street for everything except for what we need.
Yes, this is us lashing out at bloomberg more than anything else. He said that he “sees ny’ers as customers” a few weeks ago when he was raising prices. Well, now im a pissed off customer….
Give me a break,By any administration at this time with such cooperating weather most of New York was clean.Steisel or any other commishoner did not have 5000 trucks.Heads should roll.
This Daily News editorial is right on point. The city did the best it could with the available resources. Its more important to clear midtown Manhattan, the Theatre district and the financial district than the local neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Sorry but thats reality since those areas generate money for the city. The same politicians (aka Greenfield, Hikind et. al) screaming about the slow pace of snow removal are the same ones also screaming to restore subsidies and stipends for their constitutents. Sorry, but the city is broke and cannot afford it all. Do you want your neighborhood streets cleared or do you want more welfare payments to lower income residents since you obviously don’t want to pay higher taxes to fund both.
The snow is not the problem it’s the inept mayor and his employees.
Non comprende!! Now is Wednesday 8:20 PM, 45th Street and 46th Street in Boro Park ( as well as other streets)have NOT BEEN PLOWED EVEN “ONCE” since the snow on Sunday. This is called being a whiner or complainer.
what an idiotic comment “The public has been spoiled over the past 30 years:”
if he said five years or so, maybe, but 30 years!
Anyone who thinks this Daily News article is apologizing for the Mayor is not really comprehending. The Daily News is a staunch, pro-Union rag. The union screwed up by staging a work slowdown, and by milking it for all it’s worth, got way more attention than intended. Typically, people tend to be indifferent or even supportive of the unions, and usually justify such excesses. This time they went too far, too many of the wrong people saw through the b.s., and now the Daily News is desperately trying to provide cover.
If you read the papers, nearly every drowning municipality is being pushed down by union leaders’ refusal to negotiate givebacks. Unlike regular people who lose their jobs, take salary cuts, or lose benefits when the economy tanks, union workers feel none of this pain. However, the news story is slowly turning to pin the blame for the continued economic freefall on greedy, selfish, parasitic unions.
I think after Bloomberg is finished with these dimwits for embarrassing him, they’ll be begging for some snow to plow. I can’t wait to see these thieving union thugs and their scummy, braindead apologists at the Daily News eat it.
Oh, and dont you dare call us spoiled by our great history of snow removal. We get charged a fortune to live here. When the cost of living & working in NYC becomes the same price as Oklahoma I wont complain one second about these things. I pay a premium to live and work here (especially under Bloomberg), I expect the service.
“Stop complaining!” is a typucal bloomberg quotable quote. He has nothing but disdain for the regular folks (including those who make over $100,000,000).
And universal healthcare is good, too.
The next time G-d forbid a terrorist tries to do something horrible, Bloomberg will cool us all down by saying it was “umm… uuuhh… probably somebody who was angry uuhhh about the Blizzard of 2010.”
WoW..sounds like a nuclear fell on NY…Big deal…use your feeselech a bit and start walking ,exercize…we lazy new yorkers got too comfortable…Dont u remember the stories the rebbe told us where rebbe reb milech and reb zishe when the horse got stuck in the deep snow and the purets had to put them up for the night…
Come on…grow up and lets not complaint so much..
For those of you in the heimshe neighborhoods of Brooklyn whose streets have not been cleared after 4 days, consider moving to the upper west side of Manhattan (where I live) or the 5Ts (where my shver lives) and where the snow was cleared within several hours on Sunday. We have plenty of shuls, kosher restaurants, mikvahs and yeshivot and most of all, good public services. If you want to continue suffering, stay in willy and BP but please, stop whining.
if all you New Yorkers would read all the above comments you would understand why you all come across as a bunch of complainers. I want to hear from the people who say “I saw a car got stuck in the middle of the street and so my neighbors and I all got out and pushed it to the side so it would not block the street.” How about, “I was shoveling my stairs and walkway and did not stop there – I kept going for a while past a few neighbors homes…” Or something like …” I decided that I should not depend on plows and even though it can take hours, I just got a shovel and started digging out the street … and then my neighbors joined in…”
Seriously …. I have not heard one remark like that on any VIN posts related to the snow fiasco.
i am happy rudy was mayor for 9-11. otherwise the day after 9-11 we would have been told , ”go to the theater.”
He will never understand the regular businessman that if he can’t have his business open for one day he is loosing a lot of money .and you can just imagine the Mesiros Nefesh of yiden like BH Photo who is closed the whole Chal Hamoed ….
I agree. We should stop complaining. We have lost sight of the fact that everything is from Hashem. Let’s put our trust in Hashem that everything was for our good.
The streets of New York are a disgrace, many are not drivable at all, and no one without 4 wheel drive can get far. It took me 4 hours to do a drive in a 4 wheel drive SUV through Brooklyn that should of taken 30-40 minutes with many streets on the way completely un-useable, stuck cars, buses and trucks aplenty.
The problem is that the mayor’s claim that they plowed important roads, the ones with fire and policestations first, s a lie. I live next to a fire station, and around the corner of a police station, and we saw the first plow Wednesday morning. My husband was busy pushing police cars, with chains, that were getting stuck. A fireman and some neighbors tried to shovel the road. In front of my house a couple of kids were shoveling the road, and the cars still got stuck despite their efforts.
I had to stop reading half way thru – please tell this guy that the inch you leave city limits its like the snow never came so bla bla bla send a plow my way then lecture me
you are advised by the city to call 311 and complain about your street not being plowed or cars blocking the intersection.
and the city will review your complaint and send the plows to the areas needed.
if you don’t complain, don’t complain.
Lets see just who this guy Riccio is. with a little article from the times back in 1990.
Lucius J. Riccio brings to his new post as New York City Commissioner of Transportation all the skills of a master sand-castle builder. In 1986 he won the Southhampton Sand Castle Contest by constructing a 5-foot-high, 14-turret ”medieval fantasy castle, using all my engineering skills,” the 42-year-old Mr. Riccio said.But the man he is replacing, Commissioner Ross Sandler, said Mr. Riccio (pronounced RICK-ee-o) would bring a lot more than engineering skills to the $110,000-a-year job overseeing the city’s roads and bridges.”He’s an extraordinarily competent person,” Mr. Sandler said of the man who has been the department’s deputy commissioner for highways since 1986. ”In the four years that he’s been in the bureau,” Mr. Sandler continued, ”we have greatly expanded the use of in-house personnel for street resurfacing; we have made great headway in cleaning the city’s highways.” Mr. Riccio, who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.,
A continuation of the Times article
:was born in Bridgeport, Conn., the son of an Italian immigrant who became a printing union official.”My mother’s father, Guiseppi Cubelli, was the first Italian-American ever elected to the Connecticut State Senate,” Mr. Riccio said. That was in the 1920’s. ”He sponsored the first pension for police and firefighters in the state.” Before moving to the Transportation Department, Mr. Riccio was director of management services for the Board of Education’s division of school buildings and an assistant commissioner for operations in the Sanitation Department.
Big on Sports The slim bachelor, who lives in Manhattan, is a sports enthusiast. An ardent golfer, he serves on the United States Golf Association’s committee that evaluates the equity of the sport’s handicapping system. And he builds sand castles. Each year Mr. Riccio enters the Southampton contest. ”This year I got overly ambitious, and I had a collapse,” he said. But he likes to point out that his championship effort back in 1986 ”had a smooth road leading up to it” ”I wish I could smooth the roads of New York as easily as that one,” he said.
So it seems that this guy comes to public service without any real world experience. No Idea how a city ACTUALLY runs nor what kind of help a city would actually require. This is typical of limo liberals who spend all their time in either being a student in college or teaching college. NO REAL EXPERIENCE!!!! Oh, im sorry. He builds nice sandcastles.
I want to know what happens to all the hundreds of millions of dollars all of us are paying in taxes and fines, tickets and all different kinds of ……..? Does it all go on over time packages to the sanitation and fire dept workers? Does it pay the tuition fees for our friendly neighbors? Who is emptying out the kitty? Does it all end up in Maydoff’s pockets?