Winter Walking and Cycling

[MidTowner]

It is. The bylaw is clear in the standards it imposes on property owners. Very few property owners are in compliance with it for any length of time during the winter. Those are not the standards the municipal government would set for itself if it didn't delegate the work.

This is correct and we will fix it.  The notices to those that made a legitimate effort was an unintended consequence.  Bare pavement is service level the city/region cannot achieve in many cases and should not be applied to residents IMO.  Something like "Safely/Accessibly traversable" makes more sense than "bare pavement" and gives bylaw the discretion they should have.

This seems like a positive next step in figuring out how to improve the situation. It looks like staff will have found out that it is impossible to enforce the bylaw as currently written. That would be a good lesson from this winter's proactive enforcement pilot.

But I think it will be found that it's hard to enforce any bylaw. "Safely/accessibly traversable" makes a lot more sense to me, too. But it's not hard to imagine property owners complaining because, in their opinion, the sidewalk was safe (just as some rightly complain now because they did clear the sidewalk). How would those kinds of disputes be adjudicated? Staff need to have discretion to do their jobs, but they are human and do sometimes err in exercising their discretion, so there need to be processes to address property owners' disagreements.