City of Calgary announces new names for fleet of snow plows

It’s a bird, it’s a plane it’s… Plowy McPlowface! Calgarians may notice something special the next time they see a City of Calgary plow out tackling the snow. Calgary will be the first municipality in Canada to give names to our fleet of snow plows. 

Students from the Calgary School Board, the Calgary Catholic School District, private and home schools took part in the naming. Thanks to the overwhelming response from area school children we received almost 1,700 submissions through November 2021. We’ve selected some of the most creative and popular names submitted and you should see them plowing a street near you soon.

We had many wonderful submissions, and they varied in so many ways. We saw names of favourite relatives or pets, celebrities, characters and sayings from favourite TV shows and movies such as Pokémon, Harry Potter or Star Wars. The most popular submissions were Plowy McPlowface, Mr. Plow and Frosty the Snowplow. We also had Indigenous names for Chinook and snow, and French and German names, too. We even had some Calgary-centric names like Marda Scoop and Calgary Plower.

“We’d like to thank our students of all ages who helped us name our snow plows. We saw so many unique names, and while we couldn’t use them all, we can tell that the kids in our city are creative and have many interests,” said Chris McGeachy, spokesperson for City of Calgary Roads.

After such overwhelming input, 78 names were selected. Winning names will be displayed on the sides of equipment using magnetic decals, and they will also be visible on our live snow plow map at maps.calgary.ca/RoadConditions.

We encourage you to keep the winter fun going. When it is safe to do so, try taking a photo of the names you see out on the Road and tagging the photos #yycplow in your social media posts. See how many you can spot.

The full list of winning names can be found by visiting Calgary.ca/plow.