Why is the topic of snow-clearing so complicated for the city?

With winter safely distant in the rear-view mirror (fingers crossed), it seems like a good time to take a quick look at one particular pilot project that the city undertook — the clearing of snow and ice from the steps of the Corktown and Flora footbridges, the two dedicated pedestrian crossings over the Rideau Canal, to allow for their year-round use — to see how it panned out.

According to councillors Ariel Troster and Shawn Menard, whose wards are home to the two bridges, it went swimmingly. Troster describes the public feedback she received as “overjoyed,” while Menard told me this week that the responses he's heard have been positive.

“It makes so much sense, living in a winter city, to have this very easy quality-of-life improvement at a low cost,” he said.

Mary Gick, meanwhile, a leader of the Council on Aging of Ottawa's Snow Moles program, in which volunteers critically audit and report on the walkability of Ottawa's winter streets and sidewalks, told me that they were similarly pleased with the snow-clearing of the bridges' steps.

And why not? My initial and continued reaction after hearing the comments the councillors received was “Well, of course that was the response.” As I wrote last fall, the failure of municipal and federal levels of government to ensure that public pathways, bridges and stairs are passable in winter almost beggars belief.

Winter is a cold, hard fact of life in Ottawa, and often a lengthy one. Accommodations should be made to help people navigate through it, rather than simply chaining the routes shut.

Sure, it may save money not to clear snow from these passageways, but that hardly serves the many residents who rely on them to get about the city. No one (to my knowledge) has seriously suggested that we don't clear streets and sidewalks of snow, so why do we allow other well-used routes to be closed off for a good portion of the year?

The city, however, is taking a longer, more measured look at the matter. It's the bureaucratic way.

“As part of the Winter Maintenance Quality Standards (WMQS) Update, the City of Ottawa proposed a pilot project to maintain the Corktown and Flora Footbridge stairways this winter,” was the response — attributed to Roads and Parking Services manager Quentin Levesque — I received when I asked for an update on the program. “The feedback from operations staff, as well as service requests, are currently being compiled and assessed. The pilot results will be included in the WMQS review report, which is expected to be tabled in the fall.”

Far be it from me to get in the way of some good old compiling and assessing, but how this isn't a slam dunk is baffling.

Surely the cost of maintaining these routes in the winter is nothing compared to the benefits that residents derive. As Bob Dylan famously sang, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and the fact that this was even a pilot project in the first place seems overly administrative. It should have been done years ago, not as a test but as a matter of course.

The WMQS report this fall should reach the same conclusion. Hopefully the city will not end the practice or simply maintain it, but expand it. Menard notes that residents who have indicated their support for the wintertime cross-canal access also asked about other locations — Central Park, for example, on either side of Bank Street in the Glebe, or the stairs near Avenue Road, from Echo Drive to Colonel By Drive, which Menard says the NCC has for years cleared, but only during Winterlude.

The footbridges should not be the end of this story, but the beginning, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to giving the public access to public spaces.