Winter Walking and Cycling

[Pheidippides]

Change would come much faster if, upon taking office, all councillors were required to surrender their cars and walk all winter (and ride their bikes in sharrow lanes the rest of the year).
 
I cringed reading Record’s descriptiong about the cancelling of, “an ambitious plan”. The plan that was cancelled wasn’t ambitious; an ambitious plan would have been the city clearing all sidewalks within 4 hours of a snowfall.
 
I think the $26 is still probably a very good estimate; but as Dan states, now we’ll never know exactly how good or bad it was.
 
I don’t think the general public realizes how good many municipalites have become at managing their finances.
 
I was at a conference earlier this year where the City of Regina was presenting on their cost assumption model. Basically, they figured out all of the component (input) costs that go in to each city activity or service they do or provide.
 
For example, red rock replacement in their garden beds was costing $15,145/ha (of which $83 was labour, $12,033 was materials and equipment, and $3,026 was support costs (HR, legal, other, etc.)) whereas mulch replacement was only $1,832/ha (of which $83 was labour, $1,383 was materials and equipment, and $3,66 was support costs (HR, legal, other, etc.)). So it is easy to tell where you can quickly save money, and you can know what it is going to cost to add a class A park space vs. a class D park space very quickly.
 
Anyway, they did this for estimating snow removal costs on their city paths and calculated that it cost $0.07/m (for a 3m path) of which $0.03 was labour, $0.022 was materials and equipment, and $0.013 was support (HR, legal, other, etc.).
 
Now clearing trails and sidewalks will be slightly different as most sidewalks are <3m, and it quicker to do paths because of fewer turns and wider geometry, and wider means greater speed, and faster speed means fewer hours of labour and lower cost, but I think it is a suitable proxy.
 
Now Kitchener has about 1,200km (1,200,000m) of sidewalk, has 95,495 private dwellings, and gets about 30 days of snow accumulation (>=0.02cm) per winter.
 
1,200,000m x $0.07/m = $84,000 per snowfall
$84,000 per snowfall x 30 snowfalls = $2,520,000 per season
$2,520,000 per season / 95,495 private dwellings = $26.39 per season per private dwelling
 
If you only plow snowfalls of >5cm (we get an average of 12 of those per season) then total cost drops to $1,008,000 or $10.56 per season per private dwelling.
 
And before you say labour would cost more in Kitchener, consider that for full-year full-time workers Regina actually has a higher median income ($60,421 vs. $51,710) so labour costs are probably slightly higher there than here.