Quote:
Originally Posted by Minnie
Thank you to those with snowblowers who help their neighbors out, without making things more difficult for the rest of the neighborhood.
We have a guy just around the corner by 2 houses, who gets out with his snowblower & cleans his place up, then comes across & does my neighbor's house. Lovely.
Except he blows the main sidewalk up to our property & blows all my neighbor's snow on to our driveway/sidewalk. The driveway & sidewalk that is currently drifted 3 ft high with dense, heavy snow. Does the same thing on his side of the street with his snow - onto the neighbor's property on either side & into the street, narrowing it immensely because several other people push their snow on to the street & the city almost never plows here, so now we have this tiny little route through, enough for a single vehicle & everyone gets stuck in these idiots' snowpiles (or smashed into the ice piles) they've tossed onto the road - we've been here 8.5 years & they've plowed our street 3 times. That old coot makes me very cranky on snow days.
I mean, if he was going to help anyone out, why not the elderly lady on the other side of us who is dying of cancer & whose kids don't come out to shovel her out? But no, he uses his snowblower on the other neighbor's place, the 1 who has a big strapping son who is well capable of doing the job (in his early 40s, 6'5, etc). Instead, it's us & the young guy 2 doors down who dig out our dying neighbor's place every snowfall, making sure there's ice melt down, etc.
I don't care that you don't help us, I just don't need everyone else's snow added to my 3 foot high driftpiles, thanks.
I might be a tidgey bit cranky.
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I thought it's not allowed to blow snow onto the road, so I point it at the lawns. Letting the snow add to someone's driveway or sidewalk to increase their difficulty for removal is a bad and careless move though, I agree. I will say that I occasionally blast it on the road though... but this is more to
potentially avoid shooting gravel and snow at someone's vehicle in a lazy manner. If I notice the wind blowing the snow onto someone's driveway, I'll go over and at least shovel a path to their sidewalk or do their sidewalk to try and balance out the extra effort I had inadvertently added to them.
I also do the road in front of my house on occasion with the thrower. Two reasons, altruistically, it helps the neighborhood out so that they have a lower snow section to get momentum if needed. Hedonistically, I won't get embarrassingly stuck in front of my own home and I won't have to run out of the house to help the Xth person who is stuck directly in front of my place.
My parents used to live in a bad snow drift location. My brother and I would be pushing out 1-6 vehicles on bad snow days and it'd take like 10-30 minutes each time. We realized we were mainly digging out the snow under the vehicle most of the times anyways, so it was just easier to do it without a vehicle on top of it. I kept up the habit once I moved out.
I'm also seemingly lucky. On super bad days, it seems like there's a dude or two who use vehicles to plow several streets around them and some guy with a vehicle with a plow attachment and he just does the sidewalks around the streets. On those days, I'll grab my shovel and use the time I'd regularly still be out and go help someone outside with their driveway or sidewalk or whatnot. Honestly though, I don't really know my neighbors other than a handful of names.
Snow piles wise, when the temps get good and the driveway gets dry, I'll use a spreader shovel and chip off bits of the snow piles and spread it on my driveway to melt or I whack it 3-4 feet further onto the lawn. I'm sure I get weird looks. But it's basically a solar powered snow melter. When the next snow comes, I don't have to start at 2-5 feet snow pile if using a shovel. It'll be closer to 1.5.