Winter Walking and Cycling

[ijmorlan]

Hey, where is that, I need to pick up some salt for my driveway!

(I know where it is, just funny to think that enough salt to supply my house for a season is probably dumped like that in each of many locations every time there is a large snowfall)

More seriously, you’ve located another example of bad-faith argumentation. Those people don’t really care about salt; if they did they would bring it up as a separate issue applying to all snow clearing, not as a “but, but, but…” with respect to City clearing of sidewalks. It’s like people who say “shouldn’t we consider Hyperloop?” when an LRT project is about to begin construction — usually they don’t really want Hyperloop, which doesn’t actually exist now anyway, they just want to stop the LRT project. And I’m sure there are other examples.

Or maybe you don't know me.  Maybe I do care a LOT about salt use, water quality, and habitat protection.  Maybe I engaged staff and a close friend in water-protection to understand the implications of hundreds of tons more salt in our community.  Maybe I've engaged staff on ALL salt use and you just aren't aware of it.  But hey... I'm a politician.  An easy target to slam and get lols from your bros.  Surely I'm not some guy researching and doing the best I can to make the best possible decision.  Keep throwing out "bad faith" and saying I "don't really care"  that's why I'm here writing this on a Saturday night on long weekend...

I don’t know you, but I know logic well enough to use it.

If you care about salt use, you bring it up in the context of “what can we do to use less salt?” not in the context of “we can’t add a few percent to the City’s snow-clearing area because we’d have to use more salt!”. Do you vote against road construction because it would increase the salt use?

You could easily take the salt used for the sidewalks from the road salt allocation. A small reduction in the amount of salt used on the roads wouldn’t make much difference, but moving that salt over to the sidewalks so they are cleared properly would make a huge difference to pedestrians. Another approach would be to use beet juice on the sidewalks, leaving the salt use unchanged by the addition of sidewalk clearing. I understand beet juice is more expensive than salt, but the sidewalks are much smaller than the roads.

Of course, all of the above ignores that residents are already using lots of salt on sidewalks, and this usage would disappear with the advent of City plowing.