Should Toronto clear your sidewalk? In our slippery city, it's worth thinking about

I talked to a neighbour the other day about Toronto’s icy streets. It’s a common topic of conversation these days, ever since the Christmas ice storm turned our sidewalks into something resembling the Sochi bobsled track.

Our experiences have been different, my neighbour and I. I’m a young-ish guy without mobility challenges. She often walks with a cane. For me, the icy sidewalks are frustrating. For her, they’re something much worse  — they’re dangerous.

“I feel like I’m a prisoner in my own home,” she told me.

My neighbour’s experience has been amplified because she and I live in downtown Toronto, where the city doesn’t clear sidewalks of ice and snow.

Property owners downtown are supposed to clear them themselves, but many don’t — or can’t. It’s one of the lasting inequalities of the post-amalgamation era — the outer part of the city gets cleared sidewalks, but the core does not.

Could — or should  — we change that? Toronto is certainly not unique in its approach to sidewalk snow clearing — Chicago and New York have similar policies — but it’s fair to wonder if we can’t do better.

Last December, Toronto’s Transportation Services department authored a report that touched on the issue. The report notes that the provincial government doesn’t mandate any standards for sidewalk snow clearing and, anyway, it’s not really possible to use a machine to clear sidewalks less than 1.5-metres wide.

There are some reasons to question that conclusion — we have robot vacuum cleaners and hologram Tupcas but no one can design a snow-clearing machine for narrow sidewalks? — but let’s set that aside and jump right to the bottom line.

Because they don’t have a machine that could clear downtown sidewalks, staff peg the cost of clearing all sidewalks at an extra $9.9 million per year.

That’s definitely not chump change, but there are a few ways to look at it. If the city were to pay for the service with property taxes, it’d add about 0.4 per cent to the average residential tax bill. On a dollar basis, that’d mean about an extra ten dollars for most households.

On one hand, nobody likes paying more taxes, and there are a lot of services competing for more funding. On the other hand, cleared sidewalks for 10 bucks? That might be a pretty great deal.

It’s not a simple issue, but it’s an increasingly important one. We’re finally starting to recognize accessibility as a human right. Over the next decade, the TTC will spend billions to make its platforms and subway stations accessible. But what’s the benefit of all that spending if people like my neighbour don’t even feel safe walking on city sidewalks? What’s accessibility really worth? In our slippery city, that’s a question worth asking.