Walking in Waterloo Region

[ookpik]

If we were only allowed to express completely original thoughts here, there might not be a lot going on. It's just his viewpoint.

I wasn't trying to censor him but rather to point out that it's been widely held and widely discussed on this forum. My apologies if it came across otherwise.

This is the problem, and I think the solution is that there has to be some consequence to this dangerous behaviour. It generally irks me when people abuse bylaw reporting, but in this case I think the way to effect change is to make more ratepayers aware that having the sidewalks cleared is important, and that there are consequences when they aren't.

The best way to do this is to make the municipal government aware when property owners are deficient. At some point, it becomes cheaper for us collectively to just clear the sidewalks and stop fielding and following up on all these complaints. And the more property owners who get the threat of a city contractor's bill charged to them, the more who are likely to come to the realization that $50 extra in property taxes is a fair cost to having a system that works.

One way to do this would be to hold the city (and its politicians) to public account. Here's an idea...

Suppose there was a smartphone app that let people report uncleared sidewalks to the city on a crowd-sourced basis. You encounter an uncleared sidewalk, you snap a photo and you post it along with address and date/time stamp. All reports would be public, locations and instances shown, say, on Google Maps. People could post multiple reports over time on the same property in order to identify property owners who deliberately ignore the bylaw.

The city would be free to join the community and to demonstrate their commitment to enforcing the bylaw by posting each time they took action, e.g. sent the property owner a bylaw infraction warning, sent out a crew to clear the offending sidewalk, etc. (It probably wouldn't matter because we could infer it through the app. If the city started to enforce the bylaw, reports on affected properties would cease.)

At the end of the season it would become apparent if homeowners were cooperating, if the city was following up with those who weren't, what actions they were taking, how effective they were, etc. I suspect that would quickly demonstrate just how ineffective the current system is and easily make the case for general sidewalk clearing by the city.

But even if my prediction turns out wrong and the city does start to take this issue seriously, we still win. Then there will be loud whining from those caught in the net. Hopefully that too would create sufficient pressure on politicians to accomplish the same goal.