I lived in Calgary as a kid and should by virtue of being there for a few years have understood about all things “snow.” Clearly the penny never completely dropped — as witnessed by a trip I made to Ottawa as an adult many years later. There, for some strange reason, they attached these 3-metre iron bars to the tops of their fire hydrants. Why on earth do that? My hosts shot me the dead pan “are you for real?” stare. Those bars were markers so that firefighters could locate hydrants buried under the piles of snow that the real Canada deals with every winter.

There are lots of road markers and devices out there these days and Alexander, a recent arrival from Alberta and Ontario, wrote to ask about some of the things we use in B.C. to guide people on our roads.

By now we’ve all seen those funny little blue and white light boxes which are perched on light standards next to traffic signals. It’s possible though that some drivers have never actually seen them in operation. They are emergency vehicle preemption signals. They will start flashing when they detect emergency vehicle strobes or an infrared transmitter and change the........

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