Move Your Car Or Get Towed

You’ll need to read about all this again to find out when your car might get towed, and when your street might get plowed. That’s because officials worked around the clock this weekend to revise a plan for clearing streets from the past few storms.

Officials Sunday afternoon released new details of their evolving plan to clear out the mounds of ice and snow that continue to plague streets around town. Mayor Toni Harp had department heads spending 48 hours this weekend ​“breaking through” bureaucratic ​“silos” to come up with a coordinated plan ​“to get the city’s transportation system functioning again,” reported Doug Hausladen, the head of transportation, traffic and parking. A series of snowstorms gradually left more than a foot of packed-in snow and ice, compounded by a failure to enforce a neighborhood parking ban to allow plows to do their jobs.

Here’s what is still true under the new plan, as of 1 p.m. Sunday: Technically, no one anywhere in town may park on the odd side of the street this week. Otherwise they may be ticketed and towed. The hours of the ban are now Monday 9 a.m. until Sunday 3 p.m. That way plows can come in and widen travel lanes. School lots will be open for people to park their cars. (Here is a map of open school parking lots.)

Here’s what else is still true: Technically, people living on 37 narrow roads (the list appears later in this article) may not park on the street at all this week. That way payloaders and backhoes can make it in to remove the mountains of white stuff somewhere else.

Here’s what has ​“evolved”: the plan for when and how to tow people and do the clearing work, and how to let you know about that as the week progresses.

The Odd-Side Ban

The new plan is tied to garbage pick-up.

Each morning, after regular crews pick up your curbside garbage, city traffic department staffers will come ticket cars still parked on the odd side of the street. Then the towing companies will come in to haul away those cars. Then a public-works crew driving two salters and four eight-foot plows will move in to get the street done. Same street. Same day.

That’s the plan. It’s modeled in part on how the city does street-sweeping.

Here’s a catch: Because of President’s Day Monday (a government holiday), the crews won’t start doing this job until Tuesday. If you usually have garbage picked up on Monday — this week it’s Tuesday. If it’s usually Tuesday, this week it’s Wednesday … on through Saturday.

Starting Monday, traffic, fire, and police department staffers will drive through neighborhoods announcing the upcoming towing over public-address systems on their cars.

Here’s some bad news: The plows will again push huge piles of caked-in ice and snow at the foot of your umpteen-times-shoveled driveway. You’ll need to get out the shovel again.

The parking ban will remain in effect for the week in case the city has more work to do. But officials plan to have a map on the city website which they will update with a ​“green light” for parts of town where the operation is completed and towing will cease, according to Hausladen. We’ll give you updates on this as the week progresses.

“Hopefully there are no cars” left on odd sides of the street starting Monday ​“and we get no revenue for this,” Hausladen said. ​“All we’re trying to do is do what everybody is asking us to do — clear our streets and get us back to work.”

The 37 Streets

The ​“removal” effort (as opposed to just plowing) on the 37 clogged narrow streets will begin Monday, not Tuesday, according to Hausladen.

People may not park on either side of those streets beginning Monday at 9 a.m.

The public-works department will post notices a day before it hits each of the 37 streets, Hausladen promised. Then crews will tow the cars and bring in the payloaders and backhoes to retrieve and remove the piled-up snow and ice on the same day, he said.

The city has tentatively planned to hit those 37 streets in two batches, two days at a time. But that may change depending on how challenging the ice proves to remove, Hauslden said. Midnight-to-6a.m. removal operations will continue to take place in parts of downtown, including around Gateway Community College and the central business and government district, in coming days. Here’s the revised schedule for the 37 narrow neighborhood streets:

MONDAY/TUESDAY 2/17 & 18

MARVELWOOD
FAIRFIELD
ELLSWORTH
ARGONNE
CARMEL
YORK SQ.
HENRY
HARDING
LILAC
IVY

WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY 2/19 & 20

MAPLE
NORTON ST.
STANLEY
BATTER TER.
HOTCHKISS
SCRANTON
IRVING
KING PL
EDGAR
BUTTON
WILSON
CASSIUS

FRIDAY/SATURDAY 2/21 & 21

SHEFFIELD
EDGEHILL
COTTAGE
AVON
CANNER
CLARK
ACADEMY
HUGHES PL
ST. JOHNS
GREEN
WOLCOTT
SHELTER
CLAY
LLOYD
SALTONSTALL

An earlier version of this story follows:

(Updated: Sunday 9 a.m.) You won’t be able to park on the odd side of the street for a whole week, as the city scrambles to make up for failing to enforce a neighborhood ban and then clear streets in recent snow storms.

Starting Sunday Monday at 9 a.m., the city will ban parking on the odd side of all residential streets for an entire week, Mayor Toni Harp announced.

The ban will allow the city to dig out from Thursday’s Winter Storm Pax, which dropped 9 to 11 inches of heavy snow on top of a base of 8 inches.

Update: Here’s how the ban will work, according to the city’s director of emergency operations, Rick Fontana: The ban will begin Monday Feb. 16 at 9 a.m. and end Sunday Feb 23 at 3 p.m. During that time, cars are to park only on the even-numbered side of the street, or risk ticketing and towing. School parking lots will be open for use all week, since schools are closed for vacation. Once your street is ​“plowed to the curb” you can go back to parking on either side of the street.

The city will be targeting 37 narrow streets for more intensive snow removal. Starting Monday at 9 a.m., people shouldn’t park on the odd side of those streets. Additionally, the city will be asking people to remove cars from both sides of those streets to make way for snow removal. The city will post warnings on the 37 streets in advance of the intensive removal operations there.

(The city initially issued the ban starting Sunday at 9 a.m., then moved the start time to Monday at 9 a.m. Here is a map of open school parking lots.)

Town Green Special Services District and Gateway Community College will remove snow in downtown overnight Monday from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.; areas where parking is banned will be posted with signs.

Harp first announced the ban at a Friday morning briefing at the city’s Emergency Operations Center at 200 Orange St. The announcement capped days of debate reviving the question of whether or not the city should enforce an odd-side residential parking ban during storms. After a series of storms left some streets unplowable in 2011, officials and neighbors agreed the city should start ticketing and towing cars before snow piles up in successive storms. But this year officials abandoned that approach. Because the city did not enforce such a ban in the storms over the past two weeks, hard snow and ice were already mounded up on the even sides of streets when Pax hit town Thursday, making that side impossible to plow without damaging plow equipment. So the city didn’t bother instituting a residential parking ban for Pax.

As a result, snow plows had a difficult time navigating them. One 26-year veteran driver dinged several cars trying to make his way through two lanes of parked cars. (Read about that here.) All of the city streets have been plowed at least once, and are now passable to emergency vehicles, according to city officials.

Now the city plans to take advantage of next week’s February school vacation to open up school parking lots so that people can get their cars off the road to make way for snow removal — not just plowing — from the streets. The city plans three operations during that time, according to Fontana:

• Clearing snow on the odd side of residential streets.
• Removing snow from 37 specific narrow streets.
• Plowing to the curb on emergency snow routes.

From 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. Friday, crews from the Town Green Special Services District will also remove snow from downtown, though there will be no parking ban, according to city transit chief Doug Hausladen.

Hausladen said by 5 p.m. Friday, he will unveil a Google Map of available parking lots, including those at city schools. The map will also identify the 37 narrow streets that the city plans to clear within the next week. (Scroll to the bottom of this story for a list.)

The Department of Public Works will post signs on the narrow streets to alert neighbors to move their cars, Hausladen said. He said he will also use electronic means, such as SeeClickFix.com, to notify people. Snow removal is a time-consuming and costly process, he said, but it’s necessary to help people free their cars.

Meanwhile, Hausladen said the city has been ticketing and towing on snow emergency routes. The city towed 241 cars overnight Thursday night, he said.

At Friday’s EOC meeting, U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal took note of the city’s operations so far. He said he plans to join the governor in lobbying the federal government for reimbursement and possibly extra resources, such as salt, for the storm response.

Blumenthal sounded an alarm about a national shortage of salt amid ​“storms of frequency and ferocity unparalleled in recent history.”

Fontana said the city has 500 tons of salt on hand, enough for the next storm that is set to hit Saturday, dropping up to 4 inches of snow. The city buys the salt at $84 per ton from a supplier at New Haven Terminal, which receives the cargo by boat. So far, the supplier is not running out, he said.

Update: The city Sunday released a revised schedule (updated from Saturday’s) for clearing 37 narrow streets. People should move all of the cars on those streets in time before the payloaders arrive:

MONDAY/TUESDAY 2/17 & 18

MARVELWOOD
FAIRFIELD
ELLSWORTH
ARGONNE
CARMEL
YORK SQ.
HENRY
HARDING
LILAC
IVY

WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY 2/19 & 20

MAPLE
NORTON ST.
STANLEY
BATTER TER.
HOTCHKISS
SCRANTON
IRVING
KING PL
EDGAR
BUTTON
WILSON
CASSIUS

FRIDAY/SATURDAY 2/21 & 21

SHEFFIELD
EDGEHILL
COTTAGE
AVON
CANNER
CLARK
ACADEMY
HUGHES PL
ST. JOHNS
GREEN
WOLCOTT
SHELTER
CLAY
LLOYD
SALTONSTALL