How does Indy's snow fleet compare to other cities? Here's what we found.

Yahoo

19-02-2025

A woman couldn't take her mother to chemotherapy. A man missed three days of work. School buses slid as children stood nearby.
The complaints piled up as quickly as snow during Winter Storm Blair in early January.
The Indianapolis Department of Public Works deployed 70 plow drivers around the clock for nearly two weeks, logging more than 13,000 hours of overtime and dropping nearly a dozen tons of salt.
It wasn't enough.
Complaints continued to pour into the Mayor's Action Center — 784 of them — during January as snow hardened to ice on Indianapolis sidewalks and residential roads.
An IndyStar investigation found that a constrained budget, stretched-thin snowplow fleet and past policy decisions combined to strand residents in their homes, leading members of the City-County Council to interrogate the public works department over a snow response that Councilor Jared Evans called the "worst that [he's] seen." One month after the public outcry, Mayor Joe Hogsett and City-County Council President Vop Osili took action to get the city through the rest of the winter.
IndyStar examined data from six cities, including the number of plows owned, the maximum deployed at once, the miles a city is committed to plowing and the city's total road surface to get a better understanding of how other cities deploy their snow fleets. The analysis found that Indianapolis has significantly fewer snowplows per mile compared to its midwest neighbors.
This result was found by dividing the distance of miles plowed by the maximum number of trucks on the road at once. When rounded to the nearest mile, that breaks down to:
Chicago (38.4 inches average annual snowfall): 32 miles/truck + contractors
Cincinnati, OH (23.3 inches average annual snowfall): 52 miles/truck
Columbus, OH (22.4 inches average annual snowfall): 66 miles/truck
Detroit, MI (45 inches average annual snowfall): 49 miles/truck + contractors
Indianapolis (25.5 inches average annual snowfall): 100 miles/truck
Louisville, KY (13.4 inches average annual snowfall): 45 miles/truck
Nashville, TN (8.1 inches average annual snowfall): 75 miles/truck
St. Louis, MO (18.9 inches average annual snowfall): 47 miles/truck
Even cities with more snowplows took heated criticism over Winter Storm Blair. Columbus saw hundreds of complaints filed to its reporting system, and the response in St. Louis had residents so riled that snow removal became a "hot topic" on the mayor's campaign trail.
Indianapolis' snowplow inventory is just one piece of a complicated system.
Clues to how the city got to this point can be found in a December 2020 meeting of the Public Works Committee.
At that meeting, then-director Dan Parker announced that the department was doing away with a rule that hired paid contractors on residential side streets to augment its fleet following 6 inches or more of snow. Instead, denser residential streets — "connectors" — would be added to the city's plowing routes.
Administrators presented the change as a way for more local streets to be plowed faster and create more neighborhood accessibility. Contractors could be called in for residential side streets before the 6-inch threshold was met at the city's discretion.
'We eliminated the old 6-inch arbitrary rule, and we've added 300 additional centerline miles of residential streets,' Parker said on Dec. 10, 2020.
In practice, however, the city hasn't called out contractors since February 2021, despite notable snow events in 2022 and 2024.
And roads that might have previously been taken care of were left uncleared following two back-to-back January snowstorms.
Interim DPW director Sam Beres defended the department's actions at a contentious Public Works Committee meeting on Jan. 16, 2025, saying that contractors could make streets more slippery by reducing streets' cover to a thin layer of ice.
'Now all of those neighborhoods are a sheet of ice anyway,' Councilor Brian Mowery shot back.
More: 'The worst that I've seen:' City officials push DPW on unplowed residential roads
To DPW's credit, more than 80% of the city's 8,400 miles are covered by snow routes. But narrow neighborhood streets weren't part of that plan, leaving residents struggling to get basic services like mail delivery and trash removal.
In the absence of help from the city, people paid out of their own pockets for plowing so that they and their neighbors could receive in-home health care, buy groceries and get to work.
On Feb. 13, the Public Works Committee was set to discuss a proposal from Councilor Jared Evans requiring contractors to clear streets following 4 inches of snow as a matter of policy.
Two hours before the meeting began, Mayor Hogsett and Council President Osili announced a nearly identical strategy, but only for the remainder of this winter. Snow fell in Indianapolis days after the announcement, but it wasn't enough to trigger contractors.
Discussion and voting of Evans' proposal were tabled until March.
The news was a welcome change for Jack Stocks, a civil engineer who volunteers to arrange private plowing in his northeast Indianapolis neighborhood.
"The city needs to make people feel safe, and people don't feel safe if their streets aren't cleared off," Stocks said. "It's clear that they responded to the concerns, which is good. That's what they're supposed to do."
Even if the policy gets permanently adopted, Evans says it's a stopgap to a broader infrastructure issue.
'We're doing all of these projects, and we need more and more engineers and people,' Evans said. 'It's like, why do we keep contracting this out? Why don't you at some point just bring it in-house?'
When do cities plow residential roads?Indianapolis: The city doesn't salt or plow residential roads unless the city calls in private contractors, which is done on a case-by-case basis. There aren't specific guidelines about how those case-by-case decisions are made, but Department of Public Works spokesperson Kyle Bloyd said the city considers how fast snow falls, how soon it will melt, and whether more snow is expected.Columbus, OH: Residential streets are plowed by "trained auxiliary city staff" after four or more inches of snow fall, according to the city's snow control plan. These roads aren't salted, citing environmental concerns, and they're plowed last after major thoroughfares and their connectors.Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati refers to its smallest streets as "pickup routes" because they can only be plowed by pickup trucks. They're prioritized last, behind primary thoroughfares and connectors (known in Cincinnati as "residential routes"). The city bans street parking during a snow emergency, which helps plows navigate down narrow local roads.Detroit, MI: Private contractors are deployed to residential streets if the Motor City sees more than six inches of snow. The city can ban parking to help plows move through narrow roads.Louisville, KY: Neighborhood streets aren't plowed, but on Jan. 16, Mayor Craig Greenberg announced crew members would salt 70 neighborhood streets surrounding city schools. The city prioritizes major thoroughfares, connector roads and roads near major employers and hospitals, according to its website.St. Louis, MO: Residential streets are not plowed according to a map provided by the city.Nashville, TN: Some residential roads are not plowed.Chicago: Residential roads are plowed after major streets are cleared. Each plow maintains between 14 and 17 miles of side streets, a city representative said.
'If folks want to know why [contractors are] not called out all the time, every time they're called out, it does cost us quite a bit of money,' then-director Dan Parker told the Public Works Committee after the city spent $600,000 during a February 2021 snow fight.
For the 2024 fiscal year, Indianapolis allocated $62.6 million to the Department of Public Works for its operations budget, which covers snow removal. The money also covers the city's never-ending fight against potholes, a scourge compounded by the state's road funding formula, which doles out maintenance money based only on road length, not traffic volume or number of lanes. That means a rural road traveled a few times a day gets just as much state maintenance money as a heavily trafficked Indianapolis thoroughfare.
More on the public works funding gap: Indianapolis should spend 5 times what it currently does on infrastructure, study says
The cost of maintaining a staggering 8,400 miles of road depletes Indianapolis' ability to pay for other public goods – including snow removal.
Councilor Evans told IndyStar the city's administration should calculate how much contractors cost and put that money aside each winter in case of an emergency.
'We're having a snow event like this every six [expletive] years,' Evans said after the snow had melted. The city needs to adopt a policy with "a little bit of common sense to it," he continued.
After the February 2021 snowstorm, DPW asked to set aside $460,000 to pay for snow removal contractors the following year. They haven't been called out since, and that money was instead used to hire contractors for some of the city's many other infrastructure needs, according to the department.
During an August 2024 budget hearing, then-DPW director Brandon Herget said some changes to next year's operations budget would reflect patterns based on previous years' spending.
'This is a 'live within our means' budget. That does mean that hard choices have to be made,' Herget said.
More: Indy council passes budget despite 'no' votes over police, roads concerns
The same residential streets that go unplowed by the city have also been passed over for critical repairs for years.
Prospects of Marion County getting any more road funding seem nil. The statehouse has not looked favorably upon increasing taxes, leaving Indianapolis only with the option to make do with its undersized budget or pass a tax referendum.
Rep. Justin Moed, a Democrat representing Indianapolis, has authored bills looking to overhaul the state's road funding formula every year for the past five legislative sessions. This year's bill, HB 1278, stalled in committee.
Without some form of lasting change, odds are high that Indianapolis will again risk what was described in January complaints — missed doctors' appointments, a vehicle crashed into a home and broken bones from slip-and-falls.
On Feb. 10, Director Todd Wilson took the reins of the Department of Public Works. He wasn't available for an interview at the time of this article's publication.
"I look forward to working with you all in the future and to find a best way for our city to move forward," Wilson, the department's third director in 5 years, told the Public Works Committee on Feb. 13.
Ryan Murphy is the communities reporter for IndyStar. She can be reached at [phone] or [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indianapolis has fewer snowplows per mile than other midwestern cities