Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

There is a huge post in the Waterloo subreddit claiming motorized snow removal doesn't produce acceptable results and the only solution is a huge bylaw crackdown on homeowners. I don't think any of the cities actually have the labour to enforce the bylaws in a meaningful way. It's obvious individual citizen complaints don't work, so they would have to have huge teams of bylaw officers patrolling every street throughout the winter and issuing tens of thousands of warnings and fines after every snowfall. Homeowners just won't take it seriously unless they are confident they will face consequences every time they fail to clear their sidewalk. The snow removal bylaws just seem like token efforts designed to fail from the beginning.

Other's have thoroughly debunked the obviously false statement that "mechanical" clearing isn't effective (especially ironic in the case that the vast majority of business properties have mechanical cleaners in addition to the city, probably a large percentage of sidewalks are mechanically cleared).

They may be objecting to low service levels seen in other cities which is a valid complaint, we could choose to do city clearing with very low levels of service.  That wouldn't be good either, although it would absolutely still be better than what we have now, which is many sidewalks blocked 100% of the winter.

The problem this bylaw suggestion misses though, is that the bylaw is utterly inadequate.  Even if 100% of homeowners hit it (we'd be better obviously) but it would still be weeks at a time when sidewalks are impassable.

The fact is, people who are willing to hire a huge force of bylaw officers are either deluding themselves into believing doing so would be free, or are strangely callous, that they'd rather hire people to enforce the bylaw than hire snow removal people.

Now, I have been part of this group before....and I've realized that I was misguided in my beliefs.  I felt that way because I as a homeowner diligently cleared my sidewalks (well in excess of the bylaw requirements) and felt that I shouldn't pay for other's failures.  (This was way back when I owned a car and never walked anywhere).  So maybe these people would be more amenable to billing those who have racked up bylaw complaints directly for the entire cleaning program.