Though Yerevan City Hall and the heads of the city's administrative districts repeatedly said that everything was ready for plowing snow, when heavy snow fell on Yerevan on Jan. 13, a majority of the capital's streets were not cleared of snow.

The Streets

The municipality's legal department informed Hetq that there are around 1,100 streets in Yerevan. Based on calculations done in other cities, it can be presumed that the average length of a city street is 750 to 800 meters. And though the average length of Yerevan streets is shorter due to the presence of lakes, rivers, gorges, and hills, let's accept an average length of 1,000 meters (for the reliability of the estimates).

In other words, the cumulative length of the streets of Yerevan amounts to 1,100 km. Since snow is cleared on the streets along traffic lanes, let's assess their length. On average, streets have 4 traffic lanes: 2 in each direction. But again for the sake of credence, let's consider that the average number of lanes is 5 (2.5 in each direction). It turns out that the cumulative length of traffic lanes in Yerevan is 5,500 km. 

From the municipality's communal service department, Hetq managed to find out that Armenia's capital has 187 snowplow vehicles and an additional 40–50 are temporarily provided by construction companies. Let us assume that 30 of these vehicles clear the sidewalks and no more than 20 are special vehicles (for example, to ship snow). Thus, about 180 vehicles have to clear that 5,500 km.

Let's Calculate

The streets, as we said, are cleared along traffic lanes. Thus, if we divide the 5500 km by 180 vehicles, each vehicle will have to clear only 30 km — and, by the way, not 30 km of street, but 30 km of traffic lane.

If the snowplow vehicles are of poor quality and move, say, only at a cyclist's speed of 25 km/hour, and they stop at red lights, then they would clear that 30 km in 1.5 hours. 

In other words, even based on these calculations, the 1,100 streets of Yerevan should've been cleared in 1.5 hours. Yet more than 72 hours have passed since the last snowfall, and there is still "virgin" snow in many of the capital's streets.

P.S. Of course, it's difficult to draw conclusions, but there are 3 possible explanations for the current state of neglect:

The municipality doesn’t actually have 187 snowplow vehicles (in good condition). And their real number is not more than 20.

The municipality doesn't have fuel (or the money for fuel), or someone, following in Margar Ohanyan's footsteps, has pocketed it. 

Or else, "it's possible" that our communal service vehicles weren't working at all… just like the Customs Union's colleagues depicted in the video.