Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

I don't think that clarification is correct. Council explicitly passed a motion requiring pro-active bylaw enforcement to be rolled out city wide at a higher cost, and that's exactly what staff did. I believe the_councillor is incorrect about this, but if anyone want's to dig up the report and verify that staff actually followed council's direction that'd be good.

As for what is preventing the city from sending a clear order, nothing, but they don't know about it, enforcement is incomplete to a laughable degree, 99.9999% of the sidewalks in the city are never visited by an enforcement officer, unless someone calls them in, the city will never visit them. This is true under both reactive and pro-active enforcement.

Real proactive enforcement, where officers visit every sidewalk a few times per storm (like those of us who ride the LRT experience with fare enforcement) would be prohibitively expensive.

You're right, the clarification was wrong. Here's the report: INS-19-009

From the report, on the pilot: "bylaw officers proactively inspected sidewalks citywide."

So I stand by my initial assessment that the enforcement as it has been practiced doesn't seem to be achieving much, given that the sidewalks that I routinely encounter uncleared are the same ones as earlier this season, and the same ones in years past. This in spite of the fact that the City has had reports about these properties (from me and from others), and has been conducting proactive inspections.

I personally believe that clear sidewalks could be achieved with a regime requiring property owners to clear them. But it would require actual punitive measures for failure to do so. Property owners obviously feel they have nothing to fear from the City if they just don't bother clearing their sidewalks, and I would say that that's a rational belief on their parts.

It is concerning, to put it very politely, that a city councillor, who believes he has heavily researched an issue, who VOTED on this issue, and presumably read the staff report which he presents as evidence of the projects success, is unaware of this fact.

@the_councillor would you care to revise your position in light of this?