Shoveling, plowing and snow are back on the calendar again in the Twin Cities.

“We always knew this was going to happen,” smiles Matt Utke, from St. Paul. “It’s a part of living in Minnesota.”

Clearing his sidewalk on Van Buren Avenue, Nathan Hanson says he doesn’t want a repeat of last winter — with potholes on the streets and plowing delays that lasted days.  

“Last year was terrible,” he recalls. “Lots of streets were really stuck for a long time.”  

But with this latest storm, the St. Paul Department of Public Works is trying something different.

“So, we heard really clearly last year that people want us to get into residential streets faster than our traditional system allows,” notes Public Works Director Sean Kershaw.

The new plan is called “center cut plowing.”

“We send a plow right down the middle of the street and it allows us to clear a drive lane,” Kershaw explains. “The plows are about twelve feet wide and makes that safe and passable.”

Under the plan, 27 plows started working Thursday morning and will continue clearing into Friday. Those crews will clear the middle of about 550 miles of residential streets.

St. Paul Public Works says since no snow emergency is declared, plow crews can start right away, and residents don’t have to worry about what side of the street to park on.

“If it can mean that the streets get cleared a little faster, at less expense, that seems like a good idea,” Hanson says.

But there is a flip side: The one-lane method means people parking on the street may find their cars marooned in a cocoon of snow.

Public Works calls it “windrow” — a small strip of snow left behind by a plow blade.

Jeremy Brendale says it happened to him Thursday morning.

“I’m going to get it off, I’m going to get it off eventually,” he says. “Because I can still get my car out [from] like the 6 inches or whatever we got last night.

Kershaw says there were some conditions Thursday that helped plow crews.

The sun came out, he explains, and that helped with some melting, as pavement temperatures reached 45 degrees in some spots.

“We’re going to use a little bit of salt when we need to, and the salt will diminish the windrows,” Kershaw says. “And what’s really going to happen is the sun and the temperatures are going to diminish those windrows.”

He says the Department of Public Works might do this again if there are similar road conditions before the spring warmup.

The idea, Kershaw says, is to open residential streets as soon as possible and to get them cleared before any refreeze.

Hanson says he’s not in love with the idea of shoveling out his car but says it’s not a bad tradeoff for getting his street plowed earlier.

“A certain amount of that comes with the territory anyway,” he notes. “Like, you never know how much it’s going to snow or how you’re going to win or lose the snow lottery.”