An absurd snow policy
In the parts of Canada that really know winter, Toronto will forever be the butt of jokes as the city that once called in the army to help dig itself out of a snowstorm.
But Toronto’s inability to cope sensibly with the white stuff of winter goes far beyond that big storm of 1999.
The city mechanically plows the sidewalks where people are least likely to walk, and doesn’t plow them where people are most likely to walk. How does that make any sense?
As the Star’s May Warren reports, the city plows some 5,900 kilometres of Toronto’s 7,000 kilometres of sidewalks. But the majority of those are in the former cities of Etobicoke, North York, East York and Scarborough, and not in old Toronto.
While this may have started out as an issue of amalgamation — the former suburban cities had municipal sidewalk clearing and old Toronto didn’t — that it’s still hanging on after more than 20 years is just plain stupid.
Toronto city council has left the responsibility for clearing sidewalks in the central core, the densest area of the city with the most pedestrians, with individual business owners and residents who, not surprisingly, do a fairly haphazard job of it. And it’s pedestrians, including vulnerable seniors and those with disabilities, who face the dangerous consequences of the city’s nonsensical snow-clearing policy.
If the downtown sidewalks don’t meet the criteria for clearing, as the city says, there’s an easy fix for that. Change the criteria.
If the equipment the city uses to plow sidewalks in suburban areas isn’t up to the task of clearing downtown sidewalks that may be more narrow or have more obstructions, from bus shelters to utility poles, there’s a fix for that, too. Get different equipment.
If other big cities like Montreal and Ottawa can figure this out, so can Toronto.
Ottawa even has a sidewalk triage policy designed to provide the most benefit to the most people. In other words, the opposite of what Toronto does.
In Ottawa, sidewalks in the downtown core are to be cleared within six hours of the last snowflake falling, the downtown residential sidewalks within12 hours and the other residential sidewalks within16 hours. Montreal takes the task so seriously that its equipment shed includes “ice-crusher” machines that break up thick ice patches rather than leave them for salt to melt over time.
Certainly, Toronto’s winters aren’t as severe as those in Ottawa and Montreal. But as pedestrians know all too well, it takes only one slippery patch on an uncleared sidewalk to bring someone down. And with that, for the frail in particular, can come a trip to the hospital.
A 2016 Toronto Public Health report found thousands of annual emergency room visits were a result of falls on snow or ice. Those cost the health-care system $4 million per year and the city some $6.7 million a year in insurance liability claims. And it’s hardly a surprise that the report found that most falls happen in areas where the city doesn’t clear the sidewalks.
With the likelihood of more extreme weather brought on by climate change and an aging population, these trends, which have a human cost and a public financial toll, will only get worse. Unless the city changes the way it handles snow.
Former mayor Mel Lastman was ridiculed for declaring an emergency and calling in the army for that big snowstorm. But he always maintained he had no regrets about it.
“We arranged it so that senior citizens could go around the corner to get milk, so that people could get on the TTC,” Lastman said at the time.
That’s something city council should take to heart now. It doesn’t require the army to achieve that standard. It just takes a sidewalk snowplowing policy that makes some sense.