Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

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.

I don't need you to provide me with a dictionary, the point is, one reason you object to sidewalk clearing is use of salt and our environment.  But clearing the sidewalks, and not the roads would be the clear winning environmental policy, and we spend I don't know 5x the salt on roads....that's what was being argued is insincere.  You do so again here, when you pretend that ensuring sidewalks clear is a priority that must be balanced with climate change...forcing people to drive in the winter, is a policy which is bad for climate.

On to your claims here. Even if your claim is true that people are trapped in their homes for at least 2 days after a major blizzard, which I don't agree with, it would still beat our city, where people are trapped in their homes for 3 to 4 MONTHS!

This is what makes me so frustrated, is you won't admit the current system is completely broken, and incredibly harmful to people in our community.

As for the cost, please don't pretend that a city, which sees an average of 5 degrees colder in the winter than here is a comparable city for sidewalk clearing cost. As for clearing to pavement, every sidewalk I have seen, as cleared by the city, is cleared to pavement, including the pilot area, and DTK (which I pay for). Yes, the plows do not scrape to bare pavement, they don't on roads either, in both cases, a judicious amount of salt is used to achieve bare pavement over time. I don't know why I have to explain to you.