Frontline workers forced to stay home or commute on foot in snow

Snow in Vancouver on December 20, 2022

Written for Daily Hive by Hallie Dau, a PhD Candidate in public health at the University of British Columbia.

As I sit down to write this morning, my partner, a physician at a major hospital in Vancouver, is currently piling on his winter gear to walk to work. Despite living right off of a main city road, we both agreed that we could not reliably trust the city to have the roads plowed for his commute to and from work today. Rather, he plans to walk several kilometres to and from work in the snow. Many of his colleagues simply won’t make it in today because they live too far away to travel by foot, and they cannot safely make it in by driving or taking public transportation. This, in turn, means that the Vancouver hospitals will be further short-staffed today than they already are.

It goes without saying at this point that we, as a city, have failed our healthcare workers. Hospitals are completely overwhelmed. This past week the BC Children’s Hospital emergency room had over a nine-hour wait to see a healthcare provider. St. Paul’s was so understaffed that they had to shut down part of the emergency room because there was no one available to treat patients. Many patients are simply leaving against medical advice because they are tired of waiting. We have pushed hospital staff past the point of burnout, and no one seems to care.

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The absolute least we could do for not only hospital staff but all essential workers is to make sure the roads are plowed so that they can get to work and home without worry. It is completely unacceptable that the only choice available to many frontline workers is to stay home or commute on foot. After the most recent snowstorm, where people spent up to 12 hours stuck in their cars, many people were quick to point out the small budget allocated for snow removal in the Tri-City area.

Compared to major cities like Toronto, which allocated over $100 million to snow removal, Vancouver sets aside a mere $4 million. While we understandably get less snow than Toronto, this fraction of a budget puts our city at a standstill with more than a few centimetres of snow. Major roads are prioritized, but residential streets and sidewalks remain unplowed and slick.

We can do better. Let’s ask ourselves, why are we spending $400,000 to dismantle the Stanley Park bike lane, a service that allows Vancouverites the option to go car-free and reduce citywide congestion, when we can’t even afford to plow the snow for the cars we already have to travel on? We need to reprioritize our transportation values and how we spend that money. Better investments need to be made to ensure that public transportation is consistent and reliable.

Essential workers should not have to question if and how they will make it to work in the morning. As the climate crisis worsens, our weather will continue to get more extreme.

We need to better prepare ourselves for adverse and atypical weather outcomes like snowstorms. It is clear that our current setup is insufficient.

The City of Vancouver must do better to ensure that no one is forced to walk to work in the snow.