Harrisburg: The City That Doesn't Work

So we got home at the end of the day yesterday, after trekking up from Middletown and picking up Zo at the JCC, ready to enjoy the snow. I love snow, and now that I have a kid it's great to have an excuse to play in it. I was looking forward to this snow because, unlike the Valentine's Day storm (known around our house as The D-Jo Doesn't Get A Cupcake For Her Birthday Storm), this looked to be nice, fluffy wet snow that would be good for snowballs, snow angels, and the like. It was shaping up to be much better than the icy mess that we dealt with last month.

We're driving down Front Street (where, shockingly, people were still behaving as if it were a three-lane street) when I wondered out loud if the city would be plowing our street. We live on a narrow one-way street in Midtown, one that doesn't see much traffic at all, and as a result we're pretty far down the plowing priority list. Like at the bottom. Like we're still waiting for a plow after last month's storm.

After we finished having a laugh about the possibility of the street getting plowed (it's good to laugh), we turned onto the street, where we greeted by this:



Nice, huh? Apparently someone (I'm guessing it was a city worker, but who knows) started to plow the street, got about 1/3 of the way down the block, and then...who knows? Maybe his shift ended, or he got distracted, or maybe that was the exact moment that the storm bankrupted the city. For whatever reason, the plower just stopped, leaving a big wall of snow in the middle of the (only) lane of the road:



Now honestly, it could have been a lot worse. All I had to do was hop out of the car, grab my shovel, and spend about 10 minutes clearing the snow. But really, I should have had to spend zero minutes doing that -- that was 10 minutes I couldn't spend playing in the snow with my daughter.

I've been living here for just under two years, and I guess it's time for me to stop thinking that this city has some baseline of competence, like every other city I've lived in. This is, apparently, a city where the streets don't get plowed after major storms, where the members of the City Council get into fistfights with each other, and where the mayor can pretty-much single-handedly prevent a smoking ban from going into effect. Now that I know these sorts of things happen, I guess I should work on changing my attitude, and thinking of local governance more like a spectator sport than like the underpinning of society it's supposed to be.

Ah, well. The afternoon wasn't a loss, by any stretch -- we still got some prime snow-playing time in: