Montréal

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A City That Prices the Weather by the Centimetre

Every centimetre of snow costs Montreal about one million dollars to remove.

That is the city's own working figure, and it is the most useful number for understanding the place. The annual snow budget runs to roughly $197–200 million — about 3% of Montreal's entire municipal budget, and more than any other city in Canada spends by a wide margin.

The operation behind it:

• Roughly 10,000 to 11,000 kilometres of streets, plus sidewalks and some bike paths
• Nearly 3,000 workers and 2,500 vehicles deployed each winter
• About 300,000 truckloads of snow hauled per season, to more than 20 dumps
• Around 200,000 tonnes of road salt and abrasives bought each year, stored in 30 municipal garages
• Roughly 12 million cubic metres of snow removed in a typical winter
• 600 observation points to measure the thickness of ice left behind after clearing

Crews monitor conditions 24 hours a day through the winter and pre-treat major roads before a storm when the forecast allows. During a loading operation, temporary no-parking signs go up; cars still there are towed at the owner's expense.

The reason Montreal cannot simply push the snow aside, as smaller cities do, is a combination of three things: it is North America's snowiest major city, its downtown is dense enough that there is nowhere to put the snow, and it is too cold for the snow to melt on its own. So it has to be lifted, loaded and driven away.

The clock: which makes the whole thing a timed operation rather than a cleaning job.

Snow that is not removed before the next freeze-thaw cycle becomes ice, blocks drains and has to be chipped out instead of lifted. The city is not fighting snowfall; it is racing a temperature curve. In February 2025 one operation alone was projected to cost more than $50 million, and the mayor told reporters there was no predicted finishing date.

Montreal itself sits at about 73.5° west, on Eastern Time, which is calculated for the 75th meridian. That leaves the city roughly six minutes behind its own solar noon — one of the small number of places on this site where the sun reaches midday before the clock does.

A city that measures weather in dollars per centimetre, and whose own clock is six minutes late.

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