Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

I agree, and that's another reason city-clearing didn't make sense.  The data showed that even the $10M/yr City clearing option left 6% of sidewalks impassible!  Down from 15% in resident-cleared non-pilot areas.  $10M/yr to reduce the problem areas by 9% is neither effective nor efficient.

Wrong, it’s $whatever to make it so all those people don’t have to clear their sidewalks any more; and additionally actually clear 94% of the sidewalks instead of 85% of the sidewalks.

Except that I have a problem with that 6%. What’s going on there? You’re saying you hired people to clear the sidewalks and they still weren’t passable? Sounds like a management problem to me.

Also I don’t have time to do a proper analysis here, but what does that do to the chance that person has of traversing a particular block? There is a huge difference between 0.85ⁿ and 0.94ⁿ.

I suspect the answer is in the data, that staff did not release, and were unwilling or unable to analyse.

Remember, these inspections are across time as well as geography.

Probably the sidewalks were not uncleared with the same pattern as usual. For example, in the before condition it could be that on 6% of days they went out during or just after a storm and found nearly 100% of sidewalks blocked, and on the remaining days 94% they went out and found 20% of sidewalks uncleared (leading to clear routes 0% of the time, but only ~15% of sidewalks unclear), for the plowed condition they went out and on 94% of days 100% of sidewalks were clear but on 6% of the time again nearly 100% of sidewalks were uncleared.