The snowplows used here in Denver are just quite-large (~5-ton) trucks with a blade in the front and a load of sand/salt mix in the back. When the snow is heavy and plentiful, they try to collect it and save it somewhere ... somewhere where the sand/salt mixture can be recovered after the snow melts out of it. Naturally, lots of the salt leeches out and into the storm-sewer system or, in at least once case with which I'm familiar, directly into the one rather small river we have here.

I accept that your streets, having been built long before everyone owned one or two or even three cars, are as wide as ours. The streets here were built with an eye toward the then-popular notion that, if one owned more than one car, one was likely to park it on the street, thereby leaving the driveway to the garage, if there was one, available for the other car. In Denver, one is legally constrained to having no more than one car per licensed driver in each household, plus one. If your house has a single-car garage (uncommon, these days, but very common when I first lived in this house) then that means that if there are three licensed drivers, you could, in fact have three cars parked on the street and one in the garage. Snow plowing would then mean that those three cars would be "bermed" in at the curb until you dug them out. That would present a considerable hardship if you were a family of, say three drivers my age and one perhaps a bit younger. If there were a heavy, wet snow, followed by a relatively common hard freeze, say, a night of -10 degree (F) temperature, on the following morning one might find that all three cars were solidly frozen in, against the curb, and the driveway obstructed by a very solid berm of ice/snow mixture. The streets are wide enough to allow plowing with cars parked on both sides of the street, but not two-abreast. This means that plowing into the middle of the street would be very difficult with the equipment presently available.

It takes money to buy smaller snowplows, but it also takes money to repair the tens of thousands of potholes, and, of course, to pay for the damage to life, limb, and property, that they cause each spring. As with many other things, it's a tradeoff.

RE