Commercial snow & ice · Burnaby
Commercial snow removal in Burnaby, cleared before your first delivery
Parking lot plowing and de-icing for Burnaby businesses — Big Bend industrial yards, Metrotown and Brentwood retail, and loading docks that cannot wait out a storm.
What Burnaby requires
Section 31 of the Street and Traffic Bylaw requires the owner or occupier to clear snow and ice from the sidewalks around the property by 10am every day, including holidays, to a minimum cleared width of 1.2 metres — with an $80 per day fine for a business.
City of Burnaby, Street and Traffic Bylaw, Section 31
What will my property cost?
Most addresses get a price range on the next screen. Free, no obligation.
Takes about a minute · Your address stays with us
$5M liability insured · WorkSafeBC registered
The deadline is 10am, and it does not take holidays off
Section 31 of Burnaby’s Street and Traffic Bylaw puts the duty on the owner or occupier of the property: sidewalks around the property cleared by 10am every day, including holidays, to a minimum cleared width of 1.2 metres. For a business the fine is $80 per day.
Two details catch commercial operators out. The first is that holidays are included — most neighbouring bylaws are read as standing down on statutory days, and Burnaby’s is not. The second is the width. A shovelled track is not a cleared sidewalk, and 1.2 metres is also roughly what an accessibility complaint or a slip-and-fall photograph will be measured against.
Three Burnabys, three problems
Big Bend is industrial and flat, close to the Fraser and close to sea level. Its yards are dominated by manoeuvring space rather than parking rows, which changes where snow can go: push it to the convenient edge and you have taken away the swing a 53-foot trailer needs to square up on a dock. Yard clearing here is a geometry problem before it is a volume problem.
Metrotown and Brentwood are the opposite — dense retail and mixed-use where the constraint is time, not space. These lots fill continuously from opening, and a lot that is not cleared before the doors open does not get properly cleared that day. It gets worked around, one aisle at a time, while customers park in the windrows.
Burnaby Mountain and the upper slopes run roughly 370 metres above the Fraser flats. In a marginal storm the lower city gets rain and the upper city accumulates. A contractor running a single trigger depth across a Burnaby portfolio is guessing at one end of it.
Snow storage is a design decision
Burnaby’s older commercial strips — stretches of Kingsway, Hastings, Edmonds — were built building-to-sidewalk with no landscaped margin to lose. There is no natural place to put snow, which means either a planned storage location that does not block sightlines, drainage or accessible parking, or hauling.
Both are fine. What is not fine is discovering the problem during the storm, which is how snow ends up piled against a fire hydrant, over a catch basin, or in the accessible stall because it was the only space nobody was using at 4am.
We agree storage before the season and quote hauling up front where the site needs it.
What a commercial buyer should be able to check
Most contractors in this market sell 24/7 monitoring. Monitoring is not clearing, and none of them publishes how long it takes them to get to you. Ours is in the agreement, and the record of every visit — times, GPS, materials, photographs — is written as the work happens rather than assembled afterwards if someone asks.
Salt is inside the rate rather than added to the invoice later. On a Burnaby winter with a long freeze-thaw tail, that is usually the difference between the number you budgeted and the number you paid.
Put the address into the form for a measured price range on the next screen.
Trusted by leading businesses & property managers
FAQ
Commercial snow removal in Burnaby — common questions
Can you clear a warehouse yard before the first trucks arrive?
That is what the plan is built around. Yards are scheduled against your delivery windows rather than against a generic route order, and the priority surfaces — dock aprons, the approach, the turning area — are mapped separately from general parking so the sequence is deliberate.
How do you handle a retail lot that is never empty?
By clearing it before it fills. On a seasonal agreement dispatch is triggered by accumulation overnight, so the pass happens ahead of opening. Where a lot genuinely cannot be emptied, we section it and work the sections rather than pretending a full lot can be ploughed properly.
Do you clear our sidewalk frontage as well as the lot?
Yes, and in Burnaby it matters more than most places. Section 31 applies by 10am every day including statutory holidays, to a minimum 1.2 metre width, and the fine for a business is $80 a day. Your frontage is mapped into the service area so it is done on the same visit.
Where does the snow go when the site is full?
We agree storage locations before the season, based on drainage, sightlines and what the site can lose. On a constrained property that sometimes means hauling, which is quoted up front rather than raised as an extra after a heavy storm.
What do you provide for our insurer or our head office?
A per-visit record with timestamps, GPS at check-in and check-out, materials applied and photographs. National tenants and insurers tend to ask for exactly this, and it exists whether or not anyone requests it.
Ready for winter in Burnaby?
Enter the address and most properties get a price range on the next screen — priced on the actual serviceable area, measured from satellite imagery. Your exact quote follows by email.