Snow removal NYC style

I apologize for being a very bad blogger the last two days.  I needed a little blog vacation, but now I am back!  Today I witnessed an interesting scene outside of work and I snapped a few shots.  Perhaps this is a routine procedure that everyone already knows about, but it was new to me.  As you may have heard/seen, there has been a lot of snow in the city in the past week or two, and it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon.  So the city brought in some machinery to take care of business.  As pictured below, large front loaders would pick up a big pile of snow from the street or sidewalk and dump it into a truck which melted the snow and drained it back onto the street, to presumably find it's way into the sewers.  Seems to me like the city should put all the money they are spending on this process into hiring more teachers or paying city employees' pensions, but that might be too logical.