Winter Walking and Cycling

[the_councillor]

More than likely, it's just not well thought-out. That person drives on the roads, so of course they need to be cleared. He doesn't walk on the sidewalks, so of course using salt on them is a waste.

I'm not bothering with calling the city too much this season, honestly, but I personally loaded up on salt a few months' back and am dumping it liberally on my kids' route to school where I know that property owners will not clear. I've cleared a few windrows that I know never otherwise will be, but I'm not usually the one walking them to school and not usually able to take my shovel with me.

I've always tried to use salt pretty judiciously on my own sidewalk, and usually find that it's only infrequently. But I figure if I do wind up dumping 150 kilos of salt on other people's sidewalks this season, it's not even a rounding error compared to the thousands of tonnes the City uses making sure the roads are clear and dry.

Please write your councillors, they need to hear this again and again.

Some of those "insincere" people (and I do agree that is the right word, if they've deluded themselves into believing a lie to justify their belief, that's still on them) are sitting on Kitchener City Council.

That's not what insincere actually means... I'd say the feelings expressed by those on city-council are pretty genuine.  To recap:

1. City sidewalk snow clearing policies in the best of cities that do this work means people are still trapped in their homes for at least two days if the snow is light... and much longer in heavy snowfalls.  And this is just the policy... I encourage you to google the reality.  I believe, while never perfect, proactive enforcement will be better.

2. It is very expensive.  Using Ottawa as the model, the gold-standard in Canada of sidewalk-clearing (and a city that's been over-budget on snow clearing for 7 straight years) would indicate at least a 5% tax increase on top of a required inflationary increase for this level of service:

          https://ottawasun.com/opinion/letters/ed...-sidewalks

3. No city that does the clearing themselves has a bare-pavement standard.  Let me repeat that... no city that clears their sidewalks gets down to a point that's considered accessible by our own accessibility advisory committee.  They all have a packed-snow standard because they know it's not possible if the city does it.  I don't believe bare pavement is a reasonable standard either depending on weather events, but my point is, using accessibility as an argument for city-clearing is entirely fictitious. 

Say what you will about my sincerity but my genuine belief after significant research is that there are several other more important areas to spend our very limited resources on (e.g. climate change, affordable housing, etc.) than one that no other city has been able to achieve an effective level of service.