Winter Walking and Cycling

[robdrimmie]

I think they have around 15 or 20 officers -- mathematically: If we have 100 days of complaints, that would work to 21 complaints per day.  If we assume that they have 10 officers working per day, that's 2.1 complaints per officer per day for them to investigate. Mind you, some days it will be more, sometimes less. But if they can't figure out how to deal with anything less than 10 complaints per officer per day, then something is seriously wrong. Even if we said there are 10 by-law enforcers (that can deal with sidewalks), and the 2,145 complaints, that's still about 220 complaints per officer for the winter months (100 days). Of course, 100 days of winter might be on the low side some years, which only spreads the complaints more thinly.

I do agree, though, that this isn't the best solution. Wish I had an answer.

I like the math overall and agree with the outcomes, even after playing around with the model a little bit.

The complaints will be bursty, clustered around precipitation events. To the fairly limited extent we get snow in November and December we get fairly regular thaws and I think most people won't be so sick of uncleared sidewalks. By the time March rolls around the thaws start coming up again, so it seems to me that the most complaint volume is going to be during the 59 (or 60) days in February and January which bumps things to around 35 (I'm rounding down for the sake of simplicity) complaints per day.

That only bumps it to 3.5 complaints per officer per day which is well under your threshold.

I also suspect there are more complaints on weekdays (people walking to work and schools) which might bring the day count down to somewhere around 42 which brings the complaint-per-office value up to 5.