Every time it snows the plow comes through and leaves that high ridge of packed snow between the middle of the street and the cars parked on the street that must be dug out manually later. There’s got to be a different method of using the plows to avoid this but I’m not sure what it could be.
Any ideas?
Plowing, no. You can use a front end loader and scoop the snow away, but that’s awfully slow. With a plow you have to push the snow somewhere to the side, there’s no other practical option.
And that is why there are nighttime parking restrictions during the winter in places that get a lot of snow. That way the ploughs and front end loaders can work in harmony to clear the streets after a major dump.
Any sort of true plow will have this problem. My uncle was the head facilities guy at ski area hotel. They had a giant PTO powered snow blower mounted on a jeep that would throw snow over the top of the parked cars, except when it threw a rock through the windows, or destroyed it’s infeed auger on the car bumper, etc. In the end, they still had to do a lot of edging with smaller snow blowers, and the jeep rig still needed frequent repairs
And if you cut it too close to the parked cars to try to reduce the snow blockage, mostly it just gives you many more damaged cars.
Yes and no. Yes, they can turn the blade the other way so it faces the middle of the street, but then the big giant tightly packed ridge runs down the middle of the street instead of next to the parked cars. It’s much safer this way.
So, no, this really is the only way.
I can think of two other methods, but both are even more impractical.
Somehow put the ridge of snow in the middle of the road. This might be doable if the plow was shaped correctly, but go ahead and look at the volume of snow contained in each ridge. There is no way that won’t completely interfere with cars trying to drive down the road.
The plow takes all the snow along as it goes past. Yeah, not happening. Consider that the plow, depending on the location, may have to clear the roads in an area of several square miles. There’s just no way to collect and carry that much snow in a truck that will fit on the roads. You would need instead a fleet of three or four times as many vehicles, each one the size of an oil tanker, somehow vacuuming up the snow as it goes down the road.
Bottom line: usually the city’s first priority is making as many roads drivable as possible, as fast as possible, which is as it should be. That means leaving some of the snow on the road.
Move south 
I’ve seen this done. It IS a PITA. You wind up with a big snow “divider” in the middle of the street that you can only get through at intersections. IIRC, Missoula, MT did this while I was going to school there.
In the small towns where I live, a few times a year they scrape the snow to the middle of the road with a grader. Then they have a front end loader with a big snow blower on the front and ‘blow’ the snow into dump trucks that drive along beside them.
So it can be done, but it’s usually just in maintence mode.
It’s a society-based economic and health attrition system. You pay a whippersnapper and/or healthy person to shovel your vehicle out for you.
Here’s how a real snow-removal regime works (Montréal):
First, an hour before, they send out a truck with a horn to warn everyone to move their parked cars.
Then, at the time, the tow trucks arrive, moving every car that remains. Small plows clear the sidewalk, and larger plows concentrate the snow to a row in the middle of the street. Then the giant snowblower arrives, blasting the snow into a truck creeping alongside. When the truck is full, it departs and an empty one behind takes its place. The whole thing (with German titles).
Clearly, this method is being applied long after the storm has passed, not acutely after it has snowed.
They could flatten/compact the snow, and apply sand over it to make a drivable surface ontop of the snow.
In college in upstate New York, I had a roommate who grew up in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg and he always wondered why winters were such a hassle in the US. I think he claimed, for instance, that there were few, if any days off from school due to the weather there.
The only control over creating a berm is the use of a gate. This is common practice for insuring that driveways don’t get blocked. Plowing equipment drops the gate, which basically pushes the snow back into the plow blade, then lifts the gate after passing the driveway. Trying to use it in close proximity to parked cars, however, would get expensive in a big hurry.
Obviously the solution is for the snow-clearing vehicle to gather the snow, melt it on-board, and then boil the water to steam and vent the steam into the air. This will probably require the snow-clearing vehicle to have a nuclear reactor on-board in order to provide sufficient heat.
A few winters back Milwaukee had a record snowfall and rented a few snow melters from Canada to clear the airport. They looked similar to dump trucks and did just that. They used front end loaders to fill them with snow and they turned it to steam…minus the nuclear power.
I came here to snark, ‘Yes, there is, but we are keeping it a secret’.
Humbled by the Canadians.
Not a good idea. First of all, for places that get snow, it’s impractical–you’d end up with a foot or more of compacted snow and often ice under the sand, which will unevenly turn to slush and mud when spring comes. Different vehicles of different weights will rut the “snow road,” making it uneven in spots, increasing the chances of cars getting stuck. But perhaps more importantly, snow doesn’t necessarily fall evenly. Wind will blow it into drifts, where a patch of bare road is a few feet away from a four- or five-foot tall drift. You’d end up grading the snow to level it out; and if you’re doing that, you might as well just plow it anyway.
They use the “windrow” technique here. This is the ridge of plowed snow in the middle of the road. They do clear a path through the ridge at intersections, but not elsewhere. Makes left turns into a driveway really difficult.