From the point of view of the provider of winter maintenance, the operation is fairly well defined. You have to take care of this parking lot, or that road or highway, and get it “done” by a certain time and hopefully with a limited expenditure of resources. But it is sometimes interesting to look at things from the other perspective – that of the customer.
The customer most probably is thinking about making a trip – perhaps to get groceries – and all they want to know is that they can get to the store, do their shopping, get back to their car and drive back home, safely and without the trip taking too much longer than it would if it were not snowing (or had not recently snowed).
In taking that trip, the customer may well drive on county roads, state roads, and city roads, and may park in a parking lot that is maintained for the grocery store by a contractor. And the customer does not really care (and most likely does not even know) which agency has responsibility for which stretch of road, or for the parking lot. All they want is to be able to make their trip with the minimum of delay and in safety.
And, of course, we can extend this trip (although most likely not just for groceries) into other modes of transportation. So, someone taking a flight during winter needs both the air-side and the ground-side of the airport to be serviced such that flights can land, take off, and deposit passengers as needed, and those passengers can then link up with other modes (e.g. cars) to move onto the next phase of their journey.
If you will, that is the holistic view of winter maintenance – it is ensuring that travelers can make their trips without difficulty regardless of which entity is responsible for maintaining which facility on which they will drive or park. It is not only a multi-modal view of winter operations it is multi-jurisdictional as well.
Yet how much interaction is there in terms of winter operations between all the players in the winter maintenance arena? The honest answer is “not a whole lot.” This is quite understandable – I have often thought that winter maintenance is a classic situation of “when you are up to your ass in alligators, you do not have time to think about draining the swamp” – but if customer expectations continue to rise (and they seem to go in only one direction, and that is ever higher) then sooner or later the winter maintenance community is going to find that people want to know why their winter trips cannot be seamless in terms of the condition of the facility that they use (whether that is a road, an airport, or a parking lot).
If this holistic view of winter operations is ever to become a reality, then one fundamental requirement will be that information can be easily exchanged between the various entities conducting winter operations. The good news here is that information exchange is becoming easier every day – but there is a challenge in that too. Not all the information that is flying around us is equally valuable. How do we ensure that the information that needs to be exchanged is indeed shared in an efficient manner, while the information that is not immediately relevant does not get in the way of the critical stuff, but is still maintained because at different times that excess information may itself become critical?
And that is a very good question! Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think there is an answer, and I think the Professional Snowfighters Association (PSA) is part of that answer. If, to take one example, a city public works department and the contractors who maintain the parking lots within that city are to function together more seamlessly, they need to move toward becoming a single community, rather than two disparate entities as they may be right now. And that word “community” is a very important one. It implies a shared knowledge of the issues that impact the different parts of the community – the pain points, if you will. What makes plowing a parking lot difficult, and how are those issues different from (or even the same as) what makes plowing a street difficult? How can we ensure that steps taken to make one task easier do not inadvertently make the other task much harder?
Of course, once a community of practice begins to form, it is not just information that can be shared – all sorts of other things can be shared too. That includes things like training events, and even salt storage. There might perhaps be occasions where equipment can be shared. But that sharing really only becomes feasible once a community has been formed. And that is one of the critical roles of the PSA – so thank you all for being members and for joining in this community.