City Eyes Fewer Tickets in Neighbourhood Street Sweeping

Neighbourhood street sweeping is scheduled to start this Monday, May 8, and one of the City’s target goals is to issue fewer parking tickets.

“Citizens want streets swept as soon as the snow is gone,” says Brandon Harris, Director of Roadways and Operations.  “We’ve been working on ways to speed up our process and that means working toward fewer parked vehicles on the road during street sweeping.”

Earlier this year, select priority roads received an early curb-to-curb sweep in April. With these streets now clean, residents can use them for on-street parking while residential areas are being swept.     

“We want to be in-and-out of your neighbourhood faster, more economically, with fewer tickets and vehicle relocations,” Harris says.  “We’ve freed up different roadways for parking, so when residents see those ‘No Parking’ signs, we encourage them to look to the clean priority streets for available parking spaces.” 

School zones are also part of the City’s improved approach to sweeping.  In the past, school zones were swept at night and were often not completed until much later in the year. By using a combination of city and private contractors, daytime school zone sweeping is now completed in a safe and controlled manner, at the same time as the residential sweeping.

With this approach, school zones are finished earlier in the year and with significant cost-savings.  Sweepers will avoid drop-off and pick-up times to minimize interaction with students and limit disruption to traffic.

City Council is investing more than $61 million this year to build better roads and sidewalks.  Efficient and effective street sweeping supports the City’s long-term goal for moving around, ensuring roads and streets are kept in good repair.  Cleaning our residential neighbourhoods not only looks better, it reduces dust, improves the safety of our roads and improves and reduces localized water pooling which can damage roads.

With the city’s Street Sweeping Spring Blitz well underway, workers will be shifting to neighbourhood street sweeping starting May 8.  Residents have a few different ways to find out when sweeping will take place in their neighbourhoods.

The familiar yellow No Parking signs will be posted on streets up to three days before sweeping starts. For more advance notice, the full Residential Street Sweeping schedule is on the city website at Saskatoon.ca/sweeping and on the interactive Street Sweeping Map.