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Dila Velazquez, a 42-year-old resident of Dufferin Grove, said she feels homebound by the mounds of snow blocking sidewalks in her neighbourhood. She’s awaiting surgery for ankle ligaments she tore when she slipped after a snowstorm last year. Trying to scramble through the snowbanks and blocked walkways this past week has felt like she was risking further injury. 

“Crossing the street is impossible. Making it to any shops is really difficult,” she said.

The manager at her apartment complex keeps pathways on the property clear, but beyond that “I can’t walk anywhere else,” Velazquez said. She can work from home, but until the snow is removed she will be largely confined to walking her dog the short distance around her block, and will have to splash out on home deliveries for essentials. 

“The streets should be plowed by now,” she said. “The city should have funds for the purposes of taking care of snow removal, end of sentence, period.”

Relief is not yet in sight for Velazquez or anyone else who needs to get around Toronto’s winter-struck streets.

pc28����officials have said it will take up to three weeks to remove more than 50 centimetres of snow that have covered the city since last Wednesday, a time-consuming and arduous process that is separate from plowing and requires dump trucks carting away snow to storage and melting sites.

“There’s not a lot of sunshine and the snow is not moving unless we move it,” said Barbara Gray, general manager of transportation services at an update on Toronto’s snow response on Wednesday.

The city is using more than 450 dump trucks for the removal, and says it has improved its practices since the last snow operation of this scale in January 2022, including introducing new specialized equipment for sidewalks and bike lanes. 

Mayor Olivia Chow had two requests for Torontonians dealing with heavy snowfall fallout: have patience and stop blocking the road with your cars.

While pushing snow off main arteries is relatively straightforward and has largely been completed thanks to staff working around the clock, the mayor said, the real challenge now is gathering snow in dump trucks and moving it out of the way.

“I ask for patience, we are trying to remove the snow as quickly as possible,” she said at an unrelated news conference Wednesday, which some reporters had difficulty attending because nearby parking spaces were snowed in.

During a snowstorm declaration, which the city has put in place since Feb. 12, it’s illegal to park on roads designated as snow routes, which are .

“Please move your cars (off snow routes) so that city staff can get in and remove the snow,” Chow implored drivers.

Not everyone appears to be getting the message. On Wednesday morning, Taylor Brown snapped a picture of a Tesla Cybertruck parked far from the snow-covered curb on College Street near Ossington, blocking the streetcar tracks. The truck’s driver was nowhere to be seen.

“It looked like someone drove it there, parked and just left,” said Brown, 35. With the streetcar unable to pass, drivers behind it were “just piling up, waiting to come into oncoming traffic to try and sneak around.” 

TTC spokesperson Stuart Green said that transit service “is only as good as the roads are clear.”

“We rely on the city to plow the roads,” he added.

Illegal parking is a particular problem on narrow routes like Gerrard Street. So if snowbanks build up, “it doesn’t take much for parked cars to push themselves onto the streetcar tracks,” Green said.

“I don’t think anybody intends to do that on purpose but people need to be mindful about where they’re parking. That impacts our service,” Green continued.

On Monday around 10:30 a.m., a half-dozen westbound Queen streetcars were lined up bumper to bumper on Broadview Avenue — “and that was a holiday,” Green said. “It’s indicative of how quickly things can get backed up when there’s just one car. That’s all it takes.”

The TTC relies on the city and police to tag, ticket and tow cars. “We had to call them 200 times in the last three days,” Green said. “In the time we’ve been talking, we probably had two or three calls in (to the city).”

A pc28����police spokesperson said that as of midday Wednesday, officers had issued 3,158 tickets — which are $200 each — and 41 vehicles had been towed. 

Karin McArthur, a 38-year-old communications professional, has vision loss, and relies on public transit and walking to get around. She said excessive snow poses particular challenges for the visually impaired; tactile way-finding and pedestrian signal buttons are obscured, and people can’t rely on their white canes to navigate. “It’s dangerous and it’s disorienting,” she said.

McArthur said she feared she would fall into traffic this week as she tried to make it across the uncleared walkway on the overpass on St. Clair Avenue East between Yonge Street and Mount Pleasant, and considers it a “slap in the face” that roadways for drivers are given priority for clearing while pedestrians have to trudge over uneven, icy sidewalks. 

While many residents are growing impatient with city officials at the pace of snow removal, McArthur said she was shocked by the “lack of personal responsibility” property owners have shown in clearing snow from sidewalks near homes and businesses.

“I feel like everyone needs to do their part,” she said.

With files from Ben Cohen.