City Still Crippled by Snow
Thursday, December 30th, 2010
Complaints continue to filter out of New York about the city’s response to the December 26 blizzard which crippled the city.
(Phoebe Ma)
Many New Yorkers are criticizing the city government of giving preferential treatment to Manhattan by digging out the borough first and neglecting the outer boroughs, which are still sitting under a deep layer of snow.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed on December 29 that the city would have every street in the city fully plowed by the next day.
“We did not do as good a job as we wanted to do or as the city has a right to expect,” Bloomberg said during a press conference held in a hardware store in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. The mayor also said that the city has hired 700 day-laborers in order to meet the Thursday deadline.
According to The New York Times, “Arterial streets are the main thoroughfares, which are typically bus routes and are cleared first. The next focus is secondary streets, which are generally the straight roadways that feed into arterial streets. Tertiary roads, the narrow and sometimes curved residential streets that feed into secondary streets, are the last to be plowed.”
“That means that much of Manhattan, with its concentration of arterial streets, gets quicker attention,” the paper added.
Responding to the major outcry from New Yorkers, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that she would be holding hearings to determine the cause of the city’s lackluster response and how to improve it in the future. The hearings will begin early January.
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