Except for kids and cross-country skiers, everyone else hates blizzards. This year's winter was kind of soft, compared with the last one regarding temperature, but surely we got more snow than usual, especially in mid-March.

As most Montrealers park on the street, dealing with your car is a "winter sport" and it is also part of your daily life in Canada. On a previous article, I talked about some Winter Driving Tips you should follow, but now I'll refer more at what to do when you are not driving your car and need to deal with it.

Go inside if you can

This is more than obvious. The best way to deal with it is just going to an interior parking, either at your own house or on your building. There are still many options for people who rent their indoor parking spots.

Watch out for the orange signs

The city needs to be cleared, so you need to cooperate, or you will be towed. I suggest you read my article about avoiding being Towed during Snow Removal Operations and in case you are towed, try to recover it as soon as possible to avoid getting pulled multiple times.

Remove the snow from your Mags & Rims

When digging out your car, always check for the amount of snow stuck on your wheels. You may not notice it on the city, but even the most balanced car, suffers on the highway of ice on the wheels.

If you notice your vehicle is shaking when rolling above 70km/h, do a safe pause and check the status of your wheels. Rims are the harder to clean after the snow gets hardly attached to the steel, so the earlier you get rid of it, the better.

Park diagonally when possible

Even after the snowstorm, pickups and bulldozers help a lot while pushing all the snow from the center of the street to the sides. This is known as plowing, and the purpose is to facilitate pedestrians and vehicles to move around quickly. When plowing starts, your car will be either covered or separated by a wall from the cleared pathway.

Parking diagonally is a regular practice, generally accepted by most people, that limits the space to drive through but at the same time alleviates the parking pain (because in the end you need to put your car somewhere) and also reduces the fact of cars getting stuck and the amount of big hills of snow for days.

Give these guys space; they are just helping

Snow removal is an expensive operation and hard to get done. It takes thousands of vehicles and for an average snowstorm, 300,000 truckloads are required to clear out only Montreal island boroughs. 

During the fist hours, the main arteries of the city are cleared, and then, depending on the amount of snow, the rest of the city may take even up to 6 - 9 days.

Stay informed and understand the process

The City has an informative landing page for "Snow Removal Montreal" where you can track the status of the operations by borough, check on the map the actual status of your area and understand how things will be managed right after the blizzard.

After that, just deal with your car.