A winter readiness checklist for grit bins and street furniture

Every autumn the same few weeks decide how a municipality's winter goes on foot. The grit bins have to be out, full and findable before the first icy morning; the low bollards and kerbside planters have to be marked before the snow hides them from the plough; and the benches that won't survive a winter by the road have to be in the depot. Most of that work is done every year. Much less of it is written down anywhere the next person can use.

It matters more than it looks. Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration, reports that nine out of ten seriously injured pedestrians were injured by falling, and that slippery surfaces are the most common cause of falls in the street environment. A grit bin at the top of a steep path is one of the cheapest pieces of safety equipment a municipality owns — provided it is full, and provided somebody knows it is there.

This post is a pre-winter routine for the asset side of winter readiness: what to know, what to record and what to do in the weeks before the snow, so the season starts from a list rather than from memory. It is for the parks and street maintenance people who do this every year, and for whoever has just inherited it.

Start from who is responsible for what

Grit bins exist in the gap between what the municipality clears and what residents are expected to clear, so it helps to be precise about where that line runs. It is drawn differently in each country.

• Sweden. Under the Act on street cleaning (1998:814) the municipality is responsible for snow clearing and similar measures on streets, squares and other public places in a detailed plan where it is the principal. The same act lets a municipality require property owners to take care of the footway outside their property, through local regulations.
• Norway. The model police by-law (normalpolitivedtekt), which municipalities' own by-laws follow, makes the owner of a property facing a public place responsible for clearing the footway after snowfall and gritting it when it is slippery. The municipality clears and grits its own roads, paths and stairs in the priority order it sets.
• Denmark. Section 62 of the Public Roads Act (vejloven) gives the road authority the duty to clear snow, act against slippery surfaces and keep public roads and paths clean. It decides the extent and order of that work, and must lay down detailed rules after consulting the police and make them public — which is the municipality's winter regulation (vinterregulativ). Those also set the preparedness period: Aalborg's runs from week 42 to week 15, for example.

In all three countries, then, the municipality has to be able to say which stretches it treats, in which order, and where it leaves the job to others. The grit bins, and the assets that sit in the plough's path, belong in the same picture. If your winter plan names priority routes but nobody can say which bins stand on them, that is the first gap to close.

Count the grit bins before you fill them

Grit bins go where a resident can't wait for the gritter, above all on steep hills and public stairs. Stavanger has more than 130, placed by the most important steep hills, by municipal stairs and at every recycling station; Kristiansand has around 200 at difficult spots. At that scale, “we know where they are” means that two or three people know.

A grit bin record needs very little, but each item earns its place:

• Position and address — a point on the map, taken standing beside the bin, and a street address for the phone call.
• Why it is there — hill, stairs, bus stop, school route, recycling station. When the budget is cut, this is what tells you which bins to keep.
• Season — out all year, or put out in autumn and collected in spring.
• Size — the volume, so the refill round knows how much to load.
• Contents — sand, crushed grit, or grit mixed with salt. Kristiansand, for one, tells residents that its grit contains salt, which is worth knowing before a bin is placed beside planting that salt harms.
• Who fills it — your own crew or the winter contractor.
• Last filled — a date, not a tick box. A date lets you ask which bins haven't been filled since the last ice.

If you publish a map of grit bins for residents, as many municipalities do, this list is what it should be drawn from. A public map that shows a bin removed three winters ago costs more goodwill than no map at all. For what a record should hold more generally, see our guide to building a street asset register.

Plan the first fill as a round, not a list

The autumn fill is usually the one time a year every bin is visited, which makes it the best inspection you will get. Treat it as a round with a route, not a spreadsheet printed out and handed over.

• Split it by district, and order each district by priority: bins on the routes treated first get filled first.
• Check as you fill. Is the lid intact? Is the bin still where the map says? Is it upright, visible and reachable from the footway? A bin behind a new hedge or a parked skip isn't doing its job.
• Record the date and the state on the spot. Set the last-filled date, and flag a broken lid for repair then and there rather than on a note.
• Add what you find. The crew will pass bins nobody recorded. Put them on the map on the way past.

In mapzaa this is a maintenance plan: the grit bins of one district, on a map, assigned to the people doing the round. Whatever tool you use, the result should be the same: at the end of the round the register says which bins are full and ready, and which still need attention.

Later refills are best driven by the same date field. After a spell of ice, the bins that have gone longest without a fill on your priority routes are the ones to visit first.

Make an empty bin easy to report

Much of the winter's information about grit bins arrives from residents. Nacka and Stavanger both ask people to report an empty bin through their fault-reporting service, and that is the right instinct: people walking past see every bin far more often than any crew does.

A report is only useful if it can be matched to a bin. “The grit bin up the hill by the school” may describe three of them. Two small things fix that:

• Put an identifier on the lid. A short code or number, printed on a sticker, lets a resident name the exact bin and lets whoever reads the report find it in seconds. In mapzaa every asset has a code such as GRI-K3M9X2 that can be written on a sticker and typed into the search box.
• Put the reporting route on the bin too. A phone number or web address next to the code turns every passer-by into part of the inspection.

When a report comes in, record it against the bin. By spring you will have a list of the bins that ran empty most often, which is the evidence for a bigger bin, a second one, or a place on the gritter's route.

Mark what the plough can't see

Snow hides the things a plough blade finds first: low bollards, kerbside planters, cycle stands, sign posts set close to the kerb, benches on narrow footways, the edges of small walls. The time to mark them is before the first snow, while the crew can still see what they are marking.

Two fields in the register make this a routine rather than a guess each year:

• Needs a snow pole — a simple yes or no on every asset in the plough's path, so the autumn marking round is a filtered list and the spring collection round is the same list.
• Winter damage — a note or a date whenever an asset is damaged by snow clearing. After two or three winters it shows exactly where the plough and the furniture keep meeting, and where moving a bench half a metre would end the problem for good.

There is a contractual reason to do this as well. Where winter maintenance is contracted out, the question of who pays for damage is settled with the contractor — Kristiansand, for instance, notes that it is usually whoever carries out the winter maintenance who may be liable. A dated record of an asset's condition from before the season turns a damaged bollard in March from an argument into a claim.

Take in what won't survive the winter

Some street furniture is only meant for the summer: freestanding benches in the town centre, planters, extra litter bins by the beach or the outdoor pool. Taking them into the depot spares them and leaves room for the plough and for snow storage. It also makes them disappear from the street for five or six months, which is exactly when a register loses track of things.

• Record that an asset is seasonal, with a field such as “Season: all year / summer only”, so autumn collection and spring return are both a filter.
• Record where it is while it is in the depot, rather than deleting it or leaving it shown on the street. A bench in storage is still an asset; it is simply not on the map where residents expect it.
• Inspect on the way in. A bench coming off the street is easier to repair over the winter than on the day it is due back out. Set anything that needs work to maintenance as it arrives.

Give the winter contractor the same map

If a contractor clears snow or fills grit bins for you, they need the same picture you have: where the bins are, which ones they fill, which assets are marked and which are in store. A PDF map drawn last year and a list in an email are how two versions of the truth begin.

Hand over the register itself — an export in a format the contractor can open (a spreadsheet, or GeoJSON or KML for their own map) — and agree who updates it during the season. The same export can serve as the pre-season condition record described above, dated the day it was sent.

The pre-winter checklist

1. Write down who treats what: the municipality's priority routes, the property owners' duties under your local rules, and the preparedness period.
2. Get every grit bin into the register with its position, purpose, season, size, contents and who fills it.
3. Fill them as a planned round, district by district, recording the date and state of each and adding the ones nobody had recorded.
4. Put an identifier and the reporting route on every bin's lid.
5. Flag every asset in the plough's path, mark them with snow poles, and note last winter's damage.
6. Collect seasonal furniture, record where it is stored, and set anything damaged to maintenance.
7. Send the winter contractor the current register, dated, and agree who keeps it up to date.

Done once, most of this is the same list next year. And in April the same fields answer the spring questions: which poles to collect, which bins to take in, and which assets to inspect for plough damage.