@jabberwocky 38290 wrote:
You know, from my many years of commuting year-round on the W&OD, I don’t even care if they plow to the same degree that they do roads (i.e. the full, blade-on-the-ground, salt and sand treatment). Just running the damn plow down the trail with the blade an inch above the ground would make a huuuuuuuge difference in the utility of trails for commuting. The issue with the W&OD was that, with any significant snow event, you’re dealing with deep, rutted ice for weeks if the temps don’t warm up. Shallow snow and ice can be dealt with using the right equipment (studded tires), but the rutted icy mess the W&OD would become after any snow at all was almost impassible.
I know that full-on plowing can be hard on the pavement, and the departments that manage the trails don’t have the budget for repaving them, and salt hurts wildlife, etc. But that doesn’t mean they can’t do something.
Living in Reston, it was utterly bizarre how all the little Reston paths would be totally cleared within 24 hours of any snow event, but then you hit the W&OD (which gets 100 times the traffic of most of the Reston trails) and it was an utter mess.
I’m sure that a big part of the problem is that they have a near-zero chance of getting out before the trail is already compacted and rutty. A big snowblower would be the obvious solution to the general problem of snow on the trails, as it would send the snow up off the side of the trail. But a snowblower won’t do anything for compacted ice; the only way to deal with that is a blade, which goes back to your point about trail damage (and the issue of how to get the snow pile out of the ditch the trail runs in, in many spots). Given how hard it is to get trail maintenance, I think it would be an overall negative if they plowed, but then the trail was torn up for 10 years until it could get repaved. Ideally we could just get frequent maintenance of all types, but we’re dealing with the budget we have rather than the budget we might want to have.
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