On snow and technology

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Hi, I’m Currents co-editor David Tough. Welcome to your weekly Peterborough Currents email newsletter!

The City of Peterborough released an interactive map last week that tracks snowplowing operations street by street. I have some thoughts about the new tool, and about technology and snow removal more generally, in this week’s newsletter.

Unlike our recent snowfall, this one is a bit light. Let’s get to it!

On snow and technology

by David Tough

Peterborough had record-breaking snowfall this past month, and a record number of significant blizzards that made roads and sidewalks dangerous for days. After a few years of wet, mild, half-hearted winters, we have re-learned how wintry Winter can get.

Last Wednesday, in a rare break between snowstorms, the City released a new tool to the snow shoveling public: a map showing, in five minute intervals, which streets they’ve ploughed.

The map is colour-coded, so streets that have been cleared most recently show in green, those that have been cleared somewhat recently are orange, then blue, then pink, and finally purple.

The map is good because it gives you a sense, at a glance, of where the snowploughs are currently working, and why they aren’t, say, on your street. Making the tool and releasing it was a good idea.

And it’s not my intention to nitpick, but there are some issues with the design. The colours are not in any obvious order like, say, from darkest to lightest, or rainbow-style, where orange is in between red and yellow. A scale that goes from green to orange to blue to pink is just not intuitive at all.

Another quibble is that clicking on any segment of street gives you exactly the same information as the map itself (the approximate time since the road was cleared), where it could be more precise, saying what exact time the last reported ploughing was.

Beyond these design issues, it’s a bit disappointing, when taxi and rideshare companies can show you where your car currently is, on a map in real time, that we can’t see little snowplough icons literally moving around the map.

What I’m expressing is, of course, a symptom of our time: a new tool becomes available, one that less than 1% of humans could make, and our first instinct is to whine that it isn’t better than it is. We expect a lot from technology.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been working on a story about the history of snow shoveling in Peterborough. It’s not done yet, but with the release of the map, and the attendant thoughts about technology, it seems like a good time to give you a taste.

My parents lived in the south end of Peterborough in the mid-60s, and they remember seeing horses pulling a snowplough down King George Street then. I always found that fascinating. Just imagine watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey at a movie theatre while outside, horses are busy clearing the streets.

I spent a couple of days in January at Trent Valley Archives with Elwood Jones, going through old photos from the Examiner collection to find some evidence of horses pulling ploughs. We eventually found one photo, showing a large horse pulling a snowplough near the corner of Rubidge and Sherbrooke Street, in December 1966.  

There are lots of photos from the early 1970s of large diesel-powered snowploughs clearing the streets, and no photos of horses doing that kind of work then, which suggests that in the late 1960s or early 1970s the city bought snowploughs and horses were retired. It would take a deeper dig through the City’s archives, though, to confirm that.

Will it be a story eventually? Perhaps, perhaps not. But it’s something to reflect on, as we shovel our way through the current pile, how technology has changed our relationship to snow.

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