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To me it seems like a perfectly sound goal that city sidewalks be cleared of snow reasonably quickly. In fact, I'll go even farther, and say that it seems insane to allow sidewalks to be mostly unusable when a significant amount of snow is on the ground: you pretty much have to walk on the streets, which is, you know, scary and dangerous. Probably illegal as well. Yet there is no requirement or provision for clearing that snow away. I guess I can understand not caring about the safety of adults who walk, but there are a lot of kids in this city, and they don't all have SUVs. A fair number walk—I've seen it with my own eyes—and surely they can't all be orphans. I wonder why their parents don't care about their safety in this matter.

I'm not primarily concerned about the snow that falls directly from the sky to the sidewalks. Except after extraordinarily heavy snowfalls, which rarely happen around here, that amount is usually fairly tolerable by itself. It's the extra snow that's plowed onto walkways that's the problem. Let's discuss residential sidewalks and business sidewalks separately.


Sidewalks in front of residences

Usually, snow on residential sidewalks isn't too bad--if you have developed greatly reduced expectations and consider a walk successful if you survive it with life and joints mostly intact. This is partly because, with some exceptions, sidewalks in front of residences are too far from the street for the plows to push snow onto them. And some people shovel their walks, which is nice. Some people even use their snowblowers to clear not only their own share of sidewalk, but a good portion of the rest of the block as well. (If you are one of those people, please know that you have my heartfelt thanks.)

In a recent issue of the Park Ridge Herald there was an article about how there was concern that students have to walk in the street to get to Franklin school because of lack of sidewalks, and it was said that grant money would be used to put walks in along Dee (which is at that point a residential street).  My immediate thought, of course, was that the children will probably still walk in the street: shoveling won't be mandatory, shoveling compliance isn't great in general, and the sidewalks will be put in front of houses whose owners aren't even used to having sidewalks.  I thought of writing a letter to the editor about it, but the Herald doesn't print my letters. Fortunately, the paper printed a well thought-out letter from another reader, who said it better than I could have.
I generally walk in the street anyway, in residential areas, when there is snow. Why?  Several reasons. First, the streets are usually in much better shape in terms of snow clearance than the sidewalks.  Unlike sidewalks, streets aren't cleared in front of some houses and not in front of others: the whole street gets plowed. Second, the residential streets usually seem to be salted, and even when they aren't, car tires seem to drag a fair amount of salt in from the major roads. (Even toward the end of the 2008 season, when the city couldn't get the salt that it had paid for--and how does that happen, anyway?--the bad sections were few, visible, and avoidable.)  Plus, the streets are graded so that the water from melted snow runs off. The sidewalks are as well, in a simpler way, sometimes, sort of, but there are many sections where the water just pools up and then ices over later. And even the  best-cleared blocks almost always have ridges of plowed snow at the corners; I can't even imagine a day where the city plowing crews will come back, get out of the truck, and shovel through the ridges at the corners.

So, given all that, I usually pretty much stick to the streets until the sidewalks are nearly completely usable. Even when large sidewalk sections are clear I don't want to be constantly scanning ahead, making frequent, cruise missile-like decisions about whether to be on street or sidewalk for the next N houses. It makes for a longer path, plus I'm usually using my brain for other, more important things.  So far I haven't gotten into trouble for it. If I do, I'll squawk as loud as I can.

So what should be done?

There really aren't too many options. The present system, in which we rely on people's good nature to get the sidewalks cleared, isn't working great. And it never will, because there are always going to be some people who don't shovel, and it doesn't take too many like that to gum things up.

Every once in a while there is talk of making shoveling mandatory. That absolutely cracks me up, because, for one thing, there is simply no way that city workers are going to start driving up and down streets, looking for violators and handing out tickets. From what I've seen--and will try to support with evidence as I build this site--the city generally does as little enforcement on its own as it has to, only acting when they receive a complaint. Trust me: seeking out and ticketing people who don't shovel will never happen in Park Ridge. In an article in the 02/21/07 Park Ridge Journal on the subject, an alderman says that if a snow ordinance is passed, "There will be issues with enforcement." No kidding. Understatement of the decade.

But I'd have problems with an ordinance even if city government would get behind it, because it's hard to come up with a fair system.  Some cities have ordinances and some don't, and they're all over the map about the details. (Interestingly, that confuser of Park Ridge Google searches has an ordinance--and a richer demographic, it turns out.) At least one requires--and I'm not making this up--that citizens clear the snow within three hours after the end of a snowfall. I guess that means taking off work early and getting up in the middle of the night. As far as I'm concerned, anything faster than two or three days is too strict, because people have highly scheduled lives. And what are you supposed to do if you have a high fever? For that matter, what if you're old, crippled, and too poor to hire anyone, or can't find anyone to hire? In the Journal article, Rex Parker asks a very good question: "What about residents being penalized if they went out of town during the winter?"

I have been unable to verify this, but I swear that, when I was a kid, someone told me that, long ago, the city used to clear the sidewalks. The reason it stuck in my mind is that for a few seconds it struck me as utterly foreign and outrageous--city services gone wild. (Possibly this had something to do with the fact that I made a lot of money shoveling snow for neighbors.) But then it made a lot of sense to me. I haven't done the math yet, but I can't imagine it would take too many workers too long to clear the sidewalks, using fast, well-designed industrial riding blowers, and they would probably work for wages about the same as the lawn maintenance workers so many residents hire in other seasons. And they would go right through those annoying ridges at the corners.

I'm pessimistic about this being implemented before the end of time, partly because the idea seems alien to us, and partly because people in the city government are going to resist spending money for a service that most of them, no doubt, think is being taken care of just fine for free. Still, I strongly feel that it is what should be done.

Sidewalks in front of businesses

As far as I am concerned, snow in front of business establishments represents both a much bigger problem and a much simpler solution.  As it is now, businesses simply don't have to shovel. I've always heard--and I'm guessing you have as well--that the reason for this is because business owners can't be sued if they don't shovel and someone slips and falls, but can be sued if the same thing happens in a shoveled area. Leaving aside the question of whether we really want to live in a society like that, the city attorney in the above-mentioned article seems to be saying that this isn't a legal problem. (The reason I said "seems" is that she was specifically addressing residential shoveling.) Even if it is, surely the law can and should be changed. Keeping snow off sidewalks in front of businesses should be mandatory and enforced.  A cost of doing business, to save people from injuries.  Period.

But, being a realist, I know that won't happen, either. So I'm focusing on what I see as the biggest problem:  the extra snow that's plowed onto walkways when businesses hire companies that push parking lot snow there. Trying to follow the sidewalk along a major street becomes a strange triathlon of mountain climbing, quicksand traversing, and slipping and falling on your ass (elbows, head, etc.). You end up doing the only "sensible" thing: walking on the street, challenging steel vehicles much bigger and faster than you for the space.

The city told me that this mounding onto sidewalks is illegal.  Great, I thought for a second or two—all I have to do is alert Public Works to this vast problem, and it'll be solved in no time! I'm a little slow sometimes, so it took me that long to realize that they, obviously, already know about the situation. If snow plowing is one of your duties, you'd have to be a whole new kind of stupid not to know about the problem: it's everywhere you look when you drive around.  They see it. They simply allow it to continue.

Nevertheless, I called Mr. X at Public Works (name withheld because I don't want to embarrass him via Google), and asked, all ingenuous-like, why, if pushing snow onto sidewalks is illegal, it isn't stopped. I mean, it's not like these piles of snow are mobile or anything  They can't hide anywhere—the best they can manage is a leisurely melt. And they're everywhere. Catching a violator would be like fishing in a trout farm.  Mr. X's response was something like--and I'm paraphrasing a wee bit here, you understand:

Oh, we try, Lord knows we try. But the task is simply too big for us. The businesses won't do a damn thing we tell them to.  We fine them and fine them, up to $500, and they just pay it like it's pocket change, then do nothing. Then we fine them again, and they ignore us again. Sad, but it's just a cost of doing business to them, I tell ya.   

Now me, I'd imagine that he wouldn't have to fire too many $500 fines at Wally's before they'd figure out how many Italian Beefs that adds up to, and go outside with a shovel for a few minutes. I'd also imagine that the city wouldn't take long to figure out that an easy partial solution to the budget woes seems to be within easy reach.  But I'll take Mr. X's word that it's too big a job, and hope that someone will mail me some possible solutions they've thought of. In the meantime you might want to take a look at a small photo gallery related to the issue.