The blizzard that covered the city Sunday and Monday was no exception. Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning, cries of neglect could be heard across the five boroughs.  “They don’t care about Brooklyn, man,” said Tito Ernest, 32, who was trying to dig out a black Honda Accord stuck in the middle of the intersection of Rutland Road and Rockaway Parkway. “They had every chance to come out here to plow since last night.”  The city’ s sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, who oversees snow removal efforts, said he understood people’s frustration, but he asked for cooperation, patience and a little historical perspective. Mr. Doherty said that in 1996 it took the city 34 hours to clear the streets after a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow, roughly the same amount that had fallen by Monday afternoon.  “I would like to reduce that time if I could,” he said. “I’ll have to see how successful I’ll be.”  Despite the complaints of favoritism, city officials said their plan of attack for clearing snow had nothing to do with geographic preferences — say, plowing certain boroughs or neighborhoods before others — and everything to do with the type of street.  The plan divides roadways into three major categories: arterial, secondary and tertiary. Arterial streets are the main thoroughfares, which are typically bus routes and are cleared first. The next focus is secondary streets, which are generally the straight roadways that feed into arterial streets. Tertiary roads, the narrow and sometimes curved residential streets that feed into secondary streets, are the last to be plowed.  That means that much of Manhattan, with its concentration of arterial streets, gets quicker attention.  Within each of those three categories, roadways are assigned numeric values, which are used both to set priorities and to assign routes. Those determinations are made and reviewed each year by the commanders in each of 59 sanitation districts, or commands, which match the boundaries of community boards.  As a storm approaches, the first line of attack is a pre-emptive strike by 365 spreaders, each holding as much as 16 tons of salt. On Sunday, they were deployed before the snow began falling.  Once the snowfall totals two inches, about 1,700 city garbage trucks fitted with plows hit the streets.  Mr. Doherty said those plows could often move on to secondary streets as the snow fell, but the snowfall and drifts in this blizzard kept the trucks on the arterial roadways well into Monday morning. Plows were also hindered by abandoned cars stuck in the middle of secondary streets, and in a few cases plow operators could not see those obstacles through the darkness and blowing snow until they, too, were stuck.  Further, the department must typically replow where car owners have shoveled snow back into the streets.  Mr. Doherty said the secondary streets, which he anticipated being cleared Monday night and Tuesday, presented special difficulties with this much snow: It can be too much for even a 20-ton garbage truck, so front-end loaders must pick it up and move it.  “If you go in there with one of our collection trucks, if you are not careful, you will get bogged down,” he said. “As strong as it is, they cannot push that much snow out of the way.”  The Sanitation Department also looks beyond its own equipment and workforce, hiring as many as 900 day laborers to shovel bus stops and sidewalks. And private operators of heavy equipment like front-end loaders and dump trucks are hired to help out.  Mr. Doherty said that outside operators had been a component of the city’s plan for decades, but that their response for this storm had been low.  It typically takes 36 hours to make a pass through all of the smaller roads, said Vito A. Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman.  That timeline would beat a 1994 snow plan by the Giuliani administration, which estimated that 16 inches of fresh snow would take three to six days to clear from tertiary streets.  Snow removal has been laced with political overtones since 1969, when an outcry from Queens over the pace of street clearing after a blizzard knocked the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay on its heels. In 1996, Howard Golden, then the Brooklyn borough president, accused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of devoting more resources to Staten Island, which had been important to Mr. Giuliani’s election.  On Monday, Peter F. Vallone Jr., a City Council member who represents Astoria, Queens, said his neighborhood was being treated poorly.  “The only plow I saw all day was the one that crashed into the corner near my house,” said Mr. Vallone, who added that the Council’s public safety committee, which he leads, would hold a hearing on the city’s handling of the storm.  “We need an explanation,” Mr. Vallone said. “Is it budget cuts? Is it a lack of planning? What caused this storm to be different from every other one we’ve lived through?”  Mr. Doherty said the cutbacks that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had ordered in the Sanitation Department’s budget had not hurt the city’s response. And he laughed off a question about whether political concerns played a role in setting road-clearing priorities.  “No,” Mr. Doherty said. “Because if you play politics, you get fired very quickly. You have to do your job, and you have to treat everybody the same.”
New York Cityâs sanitation commissioner, John Doherty, said he hoped to have all roads cleared in less than the 34 hours it took after a 1996 blizzard.