01-31-2022, 11:15 AM
(01-31-2022, 07:43 AM)MidTowner Wrote:(01-28-2022, 01:15 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: My anger notwithstanding, I suspect that there'd have been a much better chance of this passing if it hadn't been in the middle of the pandemic when it came up.
FWIW...they massively squandered the opportunity, I think a lot of them, while they think this might be the right solution, are completely out of touch with the reality on our sidewalks--they walk to their mailbox and local park and don't really notice any of the problems. You keep pounding them with messages, pictures, etc. and they'll start to get the picture.
It's come up prior to the pandemic. At least in Kitchener, it had worse support last year, and some used the pandemic and its financial impacts as an excuse. But it has been proposed in the past, and certainly it has always been within council and city staff's power to enforce the current bylaw to a much greater extent than it has been.
They have declined to do that, because it upsets homeowners. Councils and the municipalities have done as close to nothing as possible, and we shouldn't use the pandemic as a reason to absolve them for what has been ongoing negligence.
It has come up prior, but the city has never invested in a half million dollar study which empirically demonstrated that city sidewalk clearing was extremely effective at improving sidewalk conditions and that people were happy with it.
That was by far the most progress ever made on it.
But when the study came due during the pandemic, it was the worst possible case, the city was already looking at a huge deficit (which turned out to be overblown anyway). FWIW...I feel staff presented the study in a very misleading way, by saying the sidewalks were "7% better" when they moved from ~13% blocked to ~6% blocked (i.e., sidewalks were blocked less than half as often as before, not 7% fewer).
As for the bylaw, they could enforce it 100% where every single homeowner is instantly ticketed if sidewalks are uncleared when the bylaw applies, and the sidewalks would still be garbage...the bylaw itself is fundamentally flawed.