City of Calgary begins spring street cleaning program

City of Calgary street sweepers out cleaning residential streets

The weather has warmed up enough for the City of Calgary to begin its city-wide street sweeping program.

Thirty sweepers will be out seven days a week to remove sanding materials  and other debris from the paved roads.

Typically this program starts at the begininng of April.

"We are a little bit late getting started this year because of the heavy winter we've had and one of the issues or problems is we've not been able to do a lot of winter sweeping so we have a lot of material out there to pick up," says Bill Biensch City of Calgary Roads Maintenance Manager.

Signs will be posted in communities indicating when the street cleaning crews will be in your area and the city asks you to obey those signs.

"On those days please don't have vehicles parked on the streets; if it is garbage day we ask them not to put the gabage containers on the road, we ask that you put them on the boulevard or on the sidewalk so we can still sweep the street," says Biensch.

A schedule is posted on the city's website and can be found at calgary.ca/sweep.

If residents fail to remove their vehicles they could be ticketed and towed.

"The tickets are $120.00. If they're paid within ten days the amount is $80.00," says Joan Hay Calgary Parking Authority's Manager of Enforcement. "For this operation we mainly do short towing so we'll just tow vehicles around the corner to a location that's close by."

The city hopes to complete the street sweeping in mid to late June.

One reminder; Deerfoot Trail and Stoney Trail are maintained by the province, however, the city will provide information about road closures for this work on calgary.ca or on the @yyctransport twitter account.