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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

The ordinance isn't ticky-tack, it allows people to use the sidewalk.

A lot of towns have similar and don't enforce it very much.

And snow plows that my tax dollars pay for are what keep the roads clear for vehicles. Why isn't it the same way for the sidewalk? Why do I have to take care of public property?

Because few people would want to pay the taxes needed to have public workers do it, is my guess. Plowing streets can be done fairly quickly with trucks; sidewalks would probably require more workers.

They make small trucks to plow the sidewalks. It's what cities that do it use. It's quite efficient.

Yep, they are super nice machines too, they do the job super duper fast and really well. My city uses them but only to plow "city streets," or rather "streets not in front of anyone's property and streets in front of city property"

I really really wish they'd do my property. I pay a ton in property tax, you'd think they could afford it.

Either way, it would be more expensive.

I'm not sure if the operators are hourly or salaried but it would probably cost more in manpower to do all the streets, they would probably need more machines too plus there would be an increase in maintenance costs and a reduction in lifetime of the machines.

I still can't see it as being efficient like streets. sidewalks are disjointed, have trees in them, curbs, and any number of other obstacles.

Dunno what to tell you. It works in practice in a lot of cities, including large metro areas that get a shitload of snow.

> Why isn't it the same way for the sidewalk?

Your tax dollars pay to keep the roads clear for the sake of emergency vehicles. It wouldn't be done otherwise.

Trying to plow it from the sidewalk would result in more problems than it solves.

> Why do I have to take care of public property?

Scalability. It's manual work and the city doesn't have an army of shovelers on-hand.

The plough sidewalks in Quebec, it can be done.

West Quebec here. They do indeed take care of sidewalks here. They do on the other side of the river, in Ottawa, Ontario, too.

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