St. Paul looks to one-sided winter street parking

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For many Twin Cities drivers, the post snowstorm reshuffle is almost second nature. 

If you park on the street, it’s a wintertime given (most years at least) that – at some point – you’ll have to brave the bitter cold, trudge to the car and hope it starts. If the engine revs, the next test is to see if the car can traverse the short drive to the correct block or side of the street to make way for plows. 

This has been the protocol in St. Paul for as long as Mayor Melvin Carter can remember. 

Now, the mayor says it’s time to consider a “fundamentally different strategy.” 

The city is exploring the implementation of one-sided street parking from November to March. The earliest this would be implemented could be the winter of 2025-2026. This alternative parking measure would be in lieu of the parking protocol currently used during snow emergencies, officials said during a media briefing last week with Carter and the St. Paul Department of Public Works. 

Under the proposal, which city officials have been considering for about a year, cars on residential streets would shift from parking on one side of the street to the other on a weekly basis throughout the winter. This would leave two-thirds of the street clear at all times for snow plows to push snow to the curb.

Under this model, the city would still be able to call snow emergencies, which allow for expedited towing and ticketing. But, rather than moving cars in reaction to inclement weather, residents would move their cars on a weekly basis, likely during a Sunday timeframe. 

This proposed change will not be widely implemented next winter, but the city is looking to launch a pilot in a small residential area that has yet to be determined starting winter of 2024/2025. 

Notably, the change would apply to most residential streets, but not to all. St. Paul still needs to do a parking utilization study to identify parts of the city where there is or isn’t capacity for this change, St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw said. City officials also plan to engage with the community members and neighborhood groups in the near future, and launch an advisory committee within the coming weeks. 

As St. Paul looks to implement this new model, Minneapolis officials say a single-sided street parking ban, outside of particularly snowy winters like last year, is unlikely due to Minneapolis having higher density streets than St. Paul. 

But, when discussing snow emergencies in the Twin Cities, both cities shared the same message: Snow emergencies, as they have been conducted for decades, have nothing to do with snow and everything to do with parking. 

A deeper look into the St. Paul proposal

The goal in implementing this possible change would be to allow for faster and more efficient snow removal, prioritize clearing residential streets, reduce the need for punitive tickets and towing and make parking rules easier for residents to follow, officials said. 

Under the current snow emergency model, the city tells residents where their cars should be at 9 p.m., 8 a.m., and again at 8 a.m. the next morning after a snow emergency is called, Kershaw said.

“There’s a lot of effort put into where you move your car at what time,” he said. “That creates some of the confusion that leads to tickets. In this new model, if we were to adopt this model, the message during a snow emergency is just keep your car where it should be legally parked. Period.” 

The city is still working out a plan for how it would address streets that don’t work under the one-sided parking model. Some streets are too narrow to make the switch. The proposed plan also would not work for arterial and collector streets like Grand Avenue.

The “bird’s eye view” of the program would likely improve cost efficiencies, Carter said, but he emphasized that efficiency in clearing snow so things like ambulance and fire services can get through the street is the city’s priority when rethinking the city’s protocol. 

The mayor acknowledged the new proposal would be a significant change and will need community feedback and buy-in before it is implemented. 

“For as far back as I can remember, we only had one way to clear the city when we had a major snow event,” Carter said.”That in and of itself might be a challenge.”

Would Minneapolis ever try a similar model? 

Could and would Minneapolis make a similar change? Probably not. Minneapolis is more dense than St. Paul, said Joe Paumen with the Minneapolis Department of Public Works. Maybe 40% of Minneapolis’ residential streets would be cohesive to the winter-long single-sided parking ban, he said, emphasizing the word maybe. 

“I do find it to be an interesting idea,” he said of St. Paul’s proposed change. “What you do deal with, and one of the downsides would be, that snow could be completely adhered and frozen to the other side of the street because it’s not been driven on for a week. So for example, in Minneapolis, we have under bodies on our plows that really have a lot of weight on them that can scrape the street. St. Paul does not (have underbody scrapers). They only have front plows.”

Minneapolis and St. Paul already differ in their approach to snow emergencies. For example, a St. Paul snow emergency takes two days, while Minneapolis takes three.

And every snow emergency is different, Minneapolis and St. Paul officials said over the past week. Usually a snow emergency is called when around four or more inches of snow have fallen in a given time period, Paumen said, but this isn’t an exact science. For example, as was the case in this year’s March storm, if the forecast says there will be 40-50 degree weather in the days following the storm, that will be factored in before calling a snow emergency. 

“We want to make sure that any action we take can do more good than the hassle it takes for residents to move their vehicles,” Paumen said. 

A swiftly changing climate 

These conversations come after a particularly strange winter. It’s easy to forget last year’s harsh winter as Minnesota nears the end of its most mild winter on record. 
Tracking December through February, the Minnesota State Climatology Office’s climate journal highlights that this year was the warmest winter on records for almost all department stations (all aside from Duluth, which had its second warmest winter, beat out by the winter of 1877-78). The journal is calling this year “the lost winter.”