Winter Parking and Snow Clearing
Loading Winter Parking and Snow Clearing…
Whether a parking ban can be switched on for your street this winter, which band of the plowing plan it is in, and the 72 hours you have to clear the sidewalk.
Which band is my street in?
Type a street name — a house number as well, if you have one, which is what separates the four quadrants.
Try:
Lloydminster's winter parking rules are not a calendar. From 31 October to 31 March a restriction can be switched on for your street, but it is only in force while crews are actually clearing or removing snow in your curbside collection zone — Monday to Friday, excluding holidays. So the question that decides what you do with the car is which band of the plan your own street is in, and that is what the box above answers from the City's own road register.
When a snow emergency is declared
This page cannot tell you whether one is in force
A parking ban on a Priority 1, 2 or 3 route
- What you have to do
- Take the car off the street for the hours named for your band. On a Priority 2 route the ban lifts again as soon as the road has been plowed, and stays lifted until the next snow event — so it is not on for the whole season, and not on every day of a snowy week.
- Applies to
- Priority 1 and Priority 2 routes from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Priority 3 routes overnight. Permanent winter-maintenance signs stand on every Priority 2 route, and on those the ban takes effect after a snow event of 5 cm or more.
- Declared by
- Transportation Services, under Winter Roadway Maintenance Policy 320-01
- If you don’t
- A vehicle left on the street may be towed at the registered owner's expense so the plow can get through.
City-wide residential snow removal in your zone
- What you have to do
- Get the car, the carts and anything else off the street before crews arrive. 'No Parking' signs go up where the work is, but they are not placed on every street, so the 48 hours' notice and the email alerts are the warning to rely on rather than a sign outside your own house.
- Applies to
- Residential streets and the Priority 2 routes inside the zone being worked, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. The City works in the curbside collection zones and rotates which zone goes first each year, so a zone that was first last winter is scheduled last this one.
- Declared by
- The City, which gives 48 hours' notice before crews reach a zone
- If you don’t
- The same tow and the same cost to the owner — and here a car holds up more than one pass. A loader and a blower follow the plow to lift the windrow out of the middle of the road, and they cannot work around a parked car. The City's authority for all of this is the Winter Maintenance Policy, which is what added the 31 October to 31 March bans.
Where a declaration is announced
Nothing about an active ban is published in a form a page like this can read, so this one does not try: it explains the rules and names your street's band, and the City is the only place that says what is switched on today. Its winter page sends you to a short “Traffic” address for that, and as of 30 October 2026 that address answers with a not-found page — the notices themselves are on the road and traffic updates page, first in the list below. The email list is the one that reaches you without being checked: tick “Roads & Traffic Updates” under News when you subscribe, and the 48 hours’ notice before crews reach your zone arrives that way.
- Road and traffic updates — the City's own noticesWhere a parking ban or a residential removal is announced, with the zones named.
- Subscribe to Roads & Traffic Updates by emailThe checkbox under News. 48 hours' notice before crews reach your zone arrives this way.
- Residential snow removal progress mapUpdated every weekday, showing the previous day's progress. It says where crews have been, not where they are going next.
- City of Lloydminster — winter maintenanceThe rules on this page in the City's own words, with the zoning map and the priority route poster.
The order the plows work in
The City publishes no clearing deadline for any band — what it publishes is how long the work has generally taken: about two days to finish Priority 1, then about three to four more for Priority 2, and nothing at all for Priority 3 or residential, which are worked as snow accumulates. So the plan is an order of work rather than a timetable, and blowing snow, poor visibility or more snowfall push all of it back. Over 250 km of roadway is maintained in total.
| Band | Which roads |
|---|---|
| Priority 1 | Roadways used as major travel routes, carrying the most traffic and with higher speed limits. Parking ban 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. when crews are working. The City's own figure is that finishing the Priority 1 network generally takes about two days — an observed duration rather than a deadline it has committed to. After heavy or drifting snow a Priority 1 route may be cleared more than once before anything else is touched for the first time. |
| Priority 2 | Collector roadways that join two arterial roadways. School zones are Priority 2. Parking ban 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., and again during residential snow removal with 48 hours' notice. These are the routes with the permanent winter-maintenance signs, where the ban follows a snow event of 5 cm or more and lifts once the road has been plowed. Crews move here once Priority 1 is finished, and the City's figure is three to four further days. |
| Priority 3 | Local, haul-only roadways. No overnight parking. The City publishes no hours for this one and no clearing target — it is worked as snow accumulates. |
| Priority 4 | Residential snow removal — every other street in the city, which is most of them. Not a band in the road register, so a residential street does not come up in the box above at all. Work here is the zone-by-zone campaign, announced with 48 hours' notice, and there is no clearing target. |
And then residential streets
Downtown is treated as a priority and is done at night, so the disruption lands outside trading hours; business owners are given time to clear the sidewalk in front of their own premises first. Beyond the three banded tiers, a full residential removal is not routine — Council sets aside about $1.5 million a year, roughly the cost of one city-wide removal, to be spent when a snowfall is bad enough to be a safety problem. In between, residential streets are plowed rather than removed, and crews reach them after the bands above are done.
What starts a run
On the Priority 2 routes the City publishes a figure: a snow event of 5 cm or more. Elsewhere Policy 320-01 sets the amounts of snow that call out road-maintenance resources without naming them on the public page, so there is no threshold to quote for the other bands.
The part that is yours
The ridge across your driveway
On a residential street the snow is plowed into a windrow along the middle of the road and picked up afterwards by blowers and loaders, usually within 24 hours. Do not drive over or through a windrow — the City says plainly that it is not responsible for damage done that way. And the ridge is not the only thing left behind: where snow and ice have been allowed to build up on a driveway, clearing the road can leave an ice shelf between the road and the driveway apron, and removing that is the householder's job, not the City's.
What the plows do about it
If the plow seems to have stayed off the curb on your street, that is usually deliberate — crews pull away from the curb to avoid dumping a large ridge across driveways.
The sidewalk outside your door
Within 72 hours. The sidewalk along your property is yours to clear, whichever side of 50 Avenue you live on: the owner or occupant of a property on a municipal street has 72 hours after snow or ice lands to remove it. If a Designated Officer judges there is an immediate danger, it has to be cleared straight away rather than within the 72 hours. Separately, the owner or tenant is asked to keep one metre — three feet — around the fire hydrant clear of snow and ice, and a path from it to the nearest sidewalk or road is recommended.
- If it is not done, the City may clear it or hire someone to, and charge the whole cost to the owner or occupant. Anything left unpaid is added to the property's tax roll and collected like any other tax under the Lloydminster Charter — so it does not lapse.
Snow may not go into the street
Snow and ice cleared off your own property may not be put on the street, on any public place, or on somebody else's property. Pushing a driveway's snow back onto the road leaves ridges that the plow then has to deal with, and it is an offence. The one exception is when the City has asked residents to move snow from the sidewalk onto the street for a street-cleaning or sweeping run.
Community Standards Bylaw 29-2022, s. 11.2 — $300, rising to $500 for a second offence within a year and $2,500 for a third.
Telling the city a street was missed
- Phone
- 780-875-6184
- Answered
- City Hall, office hours.
Report a Concern is the one form for a street that has not been cleared, and it saves working out which department owns the problem. A neighbour's uncleared sidewalk is Municipal Enforcement's, on 780-874-3710.
Official maps and documents
- The city’s winter page
- Winter Roadway Maintenance Policy 320-01The policy the bands, the targets and the 31 October to 31 March parking bans come from.
- Priority route mapThe City's own poster of the banded network, if you would rather see it drawn than look a street up.
- Curbside collection zoning mapThe zones the residential removal is worked in — the same zones as your bin day.
- Community Standards Bylaw 29-2022Section 11 is the sidewalk and the snow-onto-the-street rules; the fines are in the schedule at the back.
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