Here’s Roadguy’s column from the Sunday paper (plus a photo). If you’ve already read it elsewhere, skip on down to the comments below. Thanks.

“If I don’t drop her off in the goat trail in the snowbank, my other option is to go through the crosswalk and drop her off in the street.”

Metro Transit driver Tom Noland was talking about how he didn’t want a senior citizen from the northern suburbs to take a tumble when she stepped off his bus, but his options were limited on the wintry streets of downtown Minneapolis.

A few alert readers contacted Roadguy about the frozen walls of snow that mound up against the curbs after plowing. What Roadguy didn’t know is that, away from crosswalks, nobody is required to clear the rows away.

City crews do come through and dig out spots near intersections for buses to drop passengers, and many property owners remove the windrows of snow entirely. But others don’t, meaning that some passengers who wish to board a bus midblock or exit through the rear doors face an exercise in mountaineering.

The limited room for boarding and disembarking slows down things for buses, motorists and even pedestrians.This past week, Nolan picked up a man in a wheelchair at a park-and-ride in Anoka County.

“So I get to Marquette [Avenue] — where am I going to put him? I can’t land him on an 8-foot glacier or iceberg,” Nolan said. “So I went into the crosswalk, into the intersection, and dropped him off in the road.”

It wasn’t great for traffic, but the passenger had a safe landing.

Nolan’s energetic older passenger, whom he said was about 70, opted for the goat trail before he could stop her. She did end up falling, but she was able to laugh about it after she boarded his bus the next day.

The Minneapolis Public Works Department sees its mission as getting the snow off the streets and views the windrows as “snow storage” that’s shared with property owners, said Mike Kennedy, who’s in charge of snow removal for the city.

And while Metro Transit clears the snow at the park-and-ride lots it owns and also removes snow from downtown bus shelters, it doesn’t have the money or staff to clear large areas of sidewalk, said spokesman Bob Gibbons.That leaves commuters to wait for the most reliable snow-remover of all: spring.

Ghost buses on the streets?

During last week’s gridlock, several alert readers found it annoying whenever buses blocked intersections, and they found it doubly annoying whenever such buses had no passengers. How could there be empty buses on the road during such a crunch — was it poorly timed driver training?

No, there are no training runs during a snowstorm, said Gibbons. During the evening rush hour, an empty bus is usually just heading to the beginning of its route — it’s either coming from the garage or returning to downtown for another run out to the suburbs.

Of course, when traffic’s completely frozen, there’s a chance its passengers may have decided to get out and walk.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Main, Scenes and stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.