Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

My wife and I just got back from a 3.5km walk through our neighborhood. Of the hundreds of properties that we passed we encounter a total of 2 unshovelled sidewalks. Both of which were rental properties which appeared to be owned by absentee landlords.

Exactly, in neighbourhoods where most properties are owner occupied, most sidewalks are clear. If you walk up Weber St. where theres vastly heavier pedestrian traffic, but most buildings are not owner occupied, sidewalks are never cleared, not once through the whole winter.

The policies implemented by council are completely broken when it comes to transportation, but they work just fine for folks who want to walk in their residential neighbourhood--which lets well off pols (and well off residents) pretend the system works just fine.

Now I don't care that mostly "absentee landlords" don't clear their sidewalks, I care that the sidewalks are clear. We need to, as a society, stop focusing on fault--who to blame, and start focusing on solutions which actually focus on outcomes rather than "solutions" which try to focus on the "problem". In this specific example, bylaw enforcement is a "solution" only in that it is focused on those that people feel are to blame, rather than the solution of city sidewalk clearing which is focused on the outcome of having clear sidewalks (and to a more general extent, equity in mobility).

This isn't just an opinion, the city's study demonstrated that city clearing was extremely effective at improving the conditions of sidewalks, while also demonstrated empirically that bylaw enforcement did not improve the condition of sidewalks. Yet we are spending money on bylaw enforcement not city clearing.