Winter Walking and Cycling

[ijmorlan]

Regardless, cities with municipally cleared sidewalks are not significantly better off.  This is the poor-value argument.  I wish everyone could see the sidewalks in London/Guelph etc. right now, I have... 5 days after the snow and many areas are just as bad as here.  This is the key point that keeps getting lost.  I want clear sidewalks, but I'm against paying millions for a city-wide service that also doesn't work!  There is no good solution yet but copying failed approaches elsewhere is worse than doing nothing.  Of course, doing nothing won't advance us either though so to your 'what next' question... I'm only one councillor but I think we need to do several things:

I don’t know about other cities, but I do know that paths and sidewalks near me which are cleared municipally are much better than the sidewalks people here are complaining about. All you have to do is clear all the sidewalks exactly the way current municipal sidewalk clearing programs clear some of the sidewalks.

And as already argued extensively, this is cheaper than having thousands of people each clear some tiny fraction, and then having enforcement infrastructure to follow up on the ones who don’t do it.

Any argument about municipally-cleared sidewalks not being done properly is fraudulent. You can always point at somebody and say we don’t want to do it badly like them, but when there is an established fact that the municipalities are able to clear (some) sidewalks successfully in our city, for you to, in effect, claim that it’s impossible doesn’t look like good-faith argumentation to me. Nobody, to my knowledge, is asking to copy failed approaches elsewhere, but instead to copy successful approaches already in use and known to work in this city.