Winter Walking and Cycling

[the_councillor]

I just realized I should mention my sidewalk snow clearing idea, now that we have a new reader on the forum.

Basically, I was thinking that a bunch of people on the same block could get together and hire the same snow clearing company to do the sidewalk for the entire block. This would be cheaper than having 25 separate companies come and each do one house.

Then I thought, what if a whole neighbourhood did the same? Probably even more savings!

In fact, the whole city could run one hiring process and hire one company to plow all the sidewalks in the city. This would be cheaper than running dozens of separate processes all through the city.

Of course, at this point, each individual property owner couldn’t be directly involved in the process. So I can imagine a bunch of ways of doing this, but one simple way would be to divide the City up into 10 or so areas and have each one choose somebody to participate in the process on their behalf. Maybe the entire City could choose an 11th person to oversee the whole process and help keep the area representatives focussed.

I think this could work pretty well. If it does, we could imagine expanding it to other areas — maybe the same group of people could hire people to plan and build roads and parks, for example. That’s more speculative, but I think it just might work. If successful, this idea might be useful for all sorts of services that are needed by everybody in the City.

See you've got it backwards. What people should do if they are good caring citizens is get together and shovel off the road in front of their houses. Save tax dollars and get even more exercise! Live near a park; you gotta go shovel that too if you walk your dog there or run on the paths.

This argument isn't lost on me.  I suppose I disagree with the distinction between what is the "City's" and what is the "Resident's".  In my mind, we are one.  We're owned, controled, and voted in by the residents to be caretakers of our city, with a mission to make it the best we can.  I don't see parks and trails as "city" property, it's everyone's property, same as roads community centres, libraries, and yes sidewalks.

Surely it's impractical to ask residents cut grass in our parks, or shovel snow on our roads due to the amount of work but it's not impractical to ask them to do their part for their city in clearing their sidewalk.  In most cases people are clearing the driveway anyway, it takes little time to do your sidewalk as well.  It's quite literally the only service we ask of those physically able.