Why cities should plow sidewalks: GGWash Edition
Cities in the US and around the world increasingly are trying to become more walking-friendly, believing it will make them more attractive to younger residents. Meanwhile, especially in the older (and snowier) cities of the Northeast and Midwest, cities’ populations are aging as the population bubble of the Baby Boom approaches retirement age—fully a quarter of the population of Minneapolis is over 60 (Peck 2017). Many places are even beginning to realize that, just like the sought-after younger residents, older generations need and want walkable places to live as well (Peck 2017; Quednau 2017). However, often overlooked is what happens in such places in the winter: Do these cities’ commitments to walkability hold once the snow starts falling?
Individuals Shoveling May Be Hazardous To Your Public Health
One of the many reasons that cities are moving to increase walkability is for the public health benefits. “Walking is recognised to be the perfect exercise to make regular physical activity available, affordable and easily accessible to all” (Claris and Scopelliti 2016). However, the public health risks of shoveling are also well known: tens of thousands of people are injured every year, and hundreds die, while shoveling snow (Miller 2011; Jolly 2017). Additionally, as Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s notes, delegating sidewalk clearance to owners and tenants of individual neighboring properties often means that the quality of the work varies widely from lot to lot (Maclean’s 2011). Individuals trying to walk down a road are often forced to choose between walking on segments of uncleared, semi-cleared, and/or icy sidewalk where they risk fall injuries, and walking in the street where they risk being hit by a car. The elderly in particular are faced with a conundrum: often warned against shoveling, which is bad for both hearts and backs, but pushed by their doctors to get out more and especially to walk more, they often find themselves in an environment where they cannot move because they and their neighbors can’t clear the sidewalks, and walking in the road is too dangerous. In many places with heavy snows, city road plows may leave “impassable berms” of snow packed into driveway ends and sidewalk curb ramps, which are often even more difficult for shovelers to clear and insurmountable for older walkers, especially those using canes or other mobility aids, and anyone using a wheelchair.
Plow the Sidewalks: Because who else will?
In the wake of January’s storm, I’ve heard from multiple people, especially GenX and older, talking about how 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.
One Minneapolis article (Otárola 2018) 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.”’
Vacant and abandoned properties require clearing, too
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. From small vacant properties like the house down the block that’s been for sale, on and off, for over a year—I recently 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. Simply fining the owner, if one can even be found, is unlikely to get these sidewalks cleared. Perhaps the city should simply do it themselves to start with.
Curb ramps and crosswalks also need plowed
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, was 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 result of January’s storm in DC, 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. Especially if it requires heavy and/or specialized equipment, the city is better positioned to deal with these systematically than thousands of individual residents and business owners on their individual corners.
Plow the Sidewalks: All the way, all the time, for all people
…winter weather accessibility barriers are also a policy and practice problem. Winter weather would be substantially less of a problem if cities and towns made it a higher priority to reliably clear snow and ice. (Pulrang 2019)
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.”
“Yes, you shovel paths, you can claim that. But they don’t work unless you’re sighted and agile and able to mount ice.” — Olivia Norman
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 was stuck at home for weeks afterward, 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.”
“Disabled people in winter weather climates are at least as trapped by weak municipal policies and unexamined values as they are by Mother Nature herself” — Pulrang (2019)
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.”
The Individual Mandate, Municipally Enforced…or is it?
Many cities in the US and Canada require individual property owners and/or tenants to remove snow from their sidewalks. Their laws are often similar to Pittsburgh’s:
Every tenant, occupant or owner having the care or charge of any land or building fronting on any street in the city, where there is a sidewalk paved with concrete, brick, stone or other material shall, within twenty-four (24) hours after the fall of any snow or sleet, or the accumulation of ice caused by freezing rainfall, cause the same to be removed from the sidewalk. (REMOVAL OF SNOW AND ICE n.d.)
According to Maclean’s, “Vancouver residents are expected to have their sidewalks cleaned for pedestrians by 10 a.m. daily. Saskatoon gives its citizens 24 hours to get the job done”, and, remarkably, Calgary not only requires residents to clear sidewalks within 24 hours, but “any community trails that abut their property as well” (Maclean’s 2011).
in DC’s case, the requirement is that property owners clear sidewalks in front of their homes and businesses 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.
Maybe it’s not actually that expensive?
It’s not clear how much these cities spend enforcing these requirements when it’s not suspended, but many cities and their residents claim that it would be too expensive for the government to clear the sidewalks. Any time a city considers taking up shoveling sidewalks, there’s a scary-looking cost estimate batted around.
“Minneapolis has 1,910 miles of sidewalks, which are covered by an average of 52 inches of snow a year,” Otárola (2018) reports, 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 On the date the article was published, the Canadian and US dollars were nearly at par—$1 Canadian was worth approximately $1.01 US (“Canadian Dollars (CAD) to US Dollars (USD) Exchange Rate for March 17, 2011” 2011)—so these values were approximately $2.02 million and $7.09 US respectively.
3 Michel Durand-Wood (2022) of Dear Winnipeg found that by 2020, that city was spending about twice as much on sidewalk snow clearance as 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 Winnipeg reportedly spends on sidewalk snow clearance. 15 years ago, Maclean’s reported that the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, “manages to keep its sidewalks free from snow and ice for $2 million a year, or less than $7 per household;”2 by 2020, it was closer to $14 per household.3
Winnipeg in 2011 had a population of about 663,000 in 269,000 households on nearly 180 square miles, or twice as many people and units as Pittsburgh on more than three times as much land—Pittsburgh in the 2010 Census had about 306,000 people in 132,000 households, on 55 square miles (“Winnipeg, Manitoba (Code 4611040), Census Profile” 2012; US Census Bureau n.d.). The cities receive similar amounts of snow; Winnipeg averages 49.7 inches of snow per year while Pittsburgh receives an average 44.1 inches of snow (“Winnipeg Richardson International Airport” 2017; “Station: Pittsburgh INTL AP, PA” 2026).
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.
While the various costs that go into that $7-14 per household (such as, presumably, wages and other labor costs for the city staff, fuel and maintenance costs for the vehicles and equipment used, and so on) will likely vary between the two cities, especially across the border, it seems that it should follow that Pittsburgh should be able to clear its similar quantity of snow from its much smaller geographic area for an even lower cost—and for DC, which is somewhat larger than Pittsburgh but typically gets much less snow, should end up spending less.
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.4
4 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 were 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
“Many Canadian cities plow their sidewalks, as well as roads. Like drinkable water and street lights that work, clear sidewalks are a basic municipal service in these urban centres.” (Maclean’s 2011)
The public health benefits alone of not forcing individuals who may not be physically able to shovel snow, and of making it easier for people of all ages and conditions to walk and get exercise, should push places toward municipal path-plowing. There’s also the economic benefit: while there would presumably be lower retail sales of shovels and rock salt, there would also be much lower incidence of lost work-time and productivity due to injury from falls and shoveling strains, not to mention fewer people hit by cars after being forced to walk in the street. And, as Winnipeg demonstrates, it doesn’t even need to cost that much—potentially even less than the cost of enforcement against non-compliant properties.
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.