Back in planning school, I wrote a short paper for a class on why cities that get snow should plow their sidewalks, rather than leaving it to their residents. That was eight years ago now, but if anything my feeling on the matter has only hardened with time, rather like the “snowcrete” (ice) that has covered DC the last couple weeks.
A few thoughts I’ve had since then, many inspired by a 2018 article in the Minnesota Star Tribune (Otárola 2018) indicating that the city of Minneapolis was beefing up shoveling enforcement and “considering whether to take responsibility for plowing its nearly 2,000 miles of sidewalks.”
Plow the Sidewalks: All the way, all the time, for all people
Firstly, municipal sidewalk clearing is a disability rights issue: Otárola (2018) quotes a blind resident who says that in winter there are so many individual property owners who don’t shovel that ‘“I feel much more limited…. I don’t want to go places because it’s such a challenge to walk.”’
In DC, WAMU ran a similar story this winter (Kim and Turner 2026) featuring two Northwest women having trouble getting around following the recent storm:
- Olivia Norman, who is blind, and her dog guide both had trouble navigating through the snow piled along main streets. “Usually I would just be able to find the curb, but because there’s mountains of ice, I can’t find the path here.”
- Kelly Mack, who uses a wheelchair and was similarly unable to get off her block because all the crosswalks are blocked with snow. “There’s a small gap that people might be able to walk through, but this is not enough for a wheelchair to get by.”
The storm that brought DC five inches of snow and three of ice several weeks ago hit Pittsburgh with closer to fifteen inches of snow, and a wheelchair user I know has been stuck at home ever since, recently telling a City Council meeting, “Even just an inch of snow buildup prohibits me from going out because it gets stuck in my wheels and gums everything up so I can’t move.”
Like many places, DC has a requirement that property owners clear sidewalks in front of their homes and businesses—in DC’s case, at least 36 inches wide, the entire length of the property, within the first eight daylight hours after snow has stopped falling (Austermuhle 2025). However, “like any law that requires mass individual compliance, snow removal ordinances tend to be more effective on paper than in practice” (Pulrang 2019), and DC’s is no different: Austermuhle (2025) notes “Fines can’t be issued until a property owner has failed to clear snow and ice away 24 hours after a storm ends, even though the law requires that sidewalks be cleared within eight hours of the end of a storm,” and while they do happen, it tends to only be done by complaint. In the first storm of 2026, it was only possible to file such a complaint by calling 311–there is no reporting option in the app–and enforcement was suspended for more than a week after the storm.
Another Minneapolis resident, a parent of a child who uses a wheelchair, told Otárola (2018) that he “often cannot take her around their neighborhood after snowfalls because…neighbors don’t do their job…. With some property owners out of town, working odd hours or disabled themselves, [though, he] thinks the city should take over sidewalk clearing. ‘I just think it’s a basic thing that the city should do given our climate,’ he said.”
Vacant and abandoned properties require clearing, too
Beyond the cases where property owners are out of town or unable to shovel, there’s the properties where there isn’t anyone to shovel. From small vacant properties like the house next door that’s been for sale for over a year—the other day I noticed it has a DC Department of Buildings Vacant Property tag on it, so it’s been empty for a while—to large abandoned properties like failed college University of the Arts in Philadelphia, when it snows, there’s nobody around to shovel and salt the sidewalks. While property owners who are negligent or unfamiliar with the need get much of the airtime when mayors and other leaders talk about the need to shovel, vacant and abandoned properties contribute just as much to the unnecessarily patchwork nature of wintertime sidewalks. Simply fining the owner, if one can even be found, is unlikely to get these sidewalks cleared. Cities should simply do it themselves to start with.
Curb ramps and crosswalks need plowed, too
When roads are plowed, they often create large mounds and ridges of plowed snow in curb ramps and across crosswalks. On especially large roads and after heavy storms, these piles can be particularly large—on the corner near my office where two six-lane roads meet, there is a pile that, three weeks after this year’s storm, is still as tall as I am. But even the smaller ones can block people with wheels, and can be dangerous even to the non-disabled: in early 2020, a man in my parents’ city, while stepping over a ridge of plowed snow in a curb ramp, slipped on ice and fell, hit his head, and died the next morning.
These plow mounds can be particularly difficult for individuals to remove—even when the snow itself is not as concrete-like as the current DC snowpack, the plow piles are often compacted and icy, making them both more difficult to dislodge and heavier and more difficult to lift. For this reason, at the DC Pedestrian Advisory Council we have tried for years to get DPW to avoid leaving snow piles in curb ramps and to come back and remove the ones that do get created, with limited success.
Plow the Sidewalks: Because who else will?
Otárola (2018) also notes that one of the large landscaping firms that homeowners could hire to clear their sidewalks was no longer going to provide the service; it just didn’t make enough to be worth it to the company. ‘“We’ve been pretty much full in Minneapolis for years,” [office manager Daryl Larson] said…. “This year we decided we didn’t want to deal with it at all.”’
In the wake of the current storm, I’ve heard from multiple people, especially GenX and older, talking about when they were teens, they and/or others they knew would go out with their shovels any time it snowed and knock doors—often making hundreds of dollars per storm. These days, it doesn’t seem the teenagers are that into it, either, perhaps because they, too, have heard how shoveling snow may be hazardous to your health.
Maybe it’s not actually that expensive?
Of course, any time a city considers taking up shoveling sidewalks (or, indeed, any new service), there’s a scary-looking cost estimate batted around, and Otárola (2018)’s story is no exception. “Minneapolis has 1,910 miles of sidewalks, which are covered by an average of 52 inches of snow a year,” which sounds like a lot, so “City staff estimates sidewalk clearing would cost $20 million a year for continuous service and up to $6 million a year for major snowfalls only. Both would require about $4.5 million in initial costs and 120 plows.”
$20,000,000 certainly sounds like a large amount of money, and it does have a lot of zeros in it, but Minneapolis also has a population of 427,246 people, living in 192,734 households, so that works out to $46.81 per resident, or $103.77 per household, per year.1
2 Michel Durand-Wood (2022) of Dear Winnipeg found that by 2020, that city was spending about twice as much on sidewalk snow clearance as Maclean’s (2011) said it had in 2011: $4.059 million, or $338,250 for each of the 12 times the city had to plow that year. With about 3,400 km of sidewalks in the city, that’s roughly $99.49 per kilometer, or about $160.10 per mile. And it’s still only $13.51 per household per year.
(At the same time, the Canadian dollar had fallen to about 73 cents per US dollar, so this was still less than US$10 per household.)
Now, this is quite a bit more than, as we learned in Part I, Winnipeg reportedly spends on sidewalk snow clearance.2 But while of course there are other considerations, I bet $106 per year is still a lot less than most spend on snowblowers and gasoline—or the time, energy, and cardiovascular risk in hand shoveling. And, as someone who lives in Minneapolis told me at the time, “That’s way less than it costs to hire a private company to shovel for you (which you have to do anyway if you plan to be out of town).” And, again, that’s if you can find one, since, as we just heard, many such companies are getting out of the business.
Looked at another way—the city of Rochester, NY, pays for sidewalk (and also, apparently, roadway) snow clearing with what they refer to as “an embellishment fee on your property tax bill that is based on the property’s front footage.” $20,000,000 per year to plow Minneapolis’s 1,910 miles of sidewalk works out to roughly $10,471.20 per mile, or $1.98 per foot. I don’t know Minneapolis well, but for a rowhouse neighborhood like where I live in DC, that could be as little as $39.66 for homes like my neighbors’ that are just 20 feet or so wide, or potentially as much as $198.32 for properties like my landlord’s corner lot that is 100 feet on the long side.3
3 Note however that in Rochester, “For corner properties, the front footage comprises 1/3 of the longer side’s footage plus the full footage of the lot’s shorter side.” This would mean a property like my landlord’s which is 100 feet long but only 30-ish feet wide would actually only be charged for $66.11 + $59.50, or $125.60 total.
But it’s not like the government even does the part they’re responsible for now!
Well, yes—sidewalks on bridges are often not cleared, for example, sometimes with tragic consequences; this year, many DC bridge sidewalks are still impassable, nearly three weeks after the storm. Conversely, as the neighbors of many a DC public school or recreation center know, the DC Department of General Services often oversalts to a degree that sidewalks appear to glow before a storm.
However, unifying all responsibility for sidewalk snow clearance under a single city department, rather than a confusing mishmash of local and federal agencies and private actors, seems to me likely to lead to a better result. After all, if the same staff is responsible for clearing the sidewalk on a bridge and the sidewalk on either side, they can just do the whole thing at once, rather than just dropping in to do the bridge itself and nothing else nearby.
Conclusion
The government universally plows roads, and nowhere are adjacent property owners expected to go shovel out their section of the public street. If we really believe in walking as transportation, we should treat sidewalks, curb ramps, and crosswalks the same way, and have the government plow them, too.
References
Citation
@online{swiderski2026,
author = {Swiderski, J. I.},
title = {On Walkability in Winter, {Part} {II}},
date = {2026-02-14},
url = {https://jski.net/posts/on-winter-walkability.html},
langid = {en}
}