Kitchener Snow Clearing (PT. 1)

Earlier this week, I shared on Twitter some of the main points from the staff report on snow clearing. Some folks said they found it helpful (because not everyone wants to read a 100+ page staff report apparently!) so I thought I would share those highlights here as well. From my Twitter thread:

It may be scorching hot out but the City of Kitchener is discussing its plans for winter sidewalk maintenance soon. On Aug 31st the issue will be discussed at Committee and then it goes to Council on Sept 14th. You can read the staff report here, which does not recommend city sidewalk snow clearing.

Here’s a few conclusions from the staff report. 

​A quick overview of staff’s recommendations. 

​There were essentially 2 snow clearing pilot areas last winter. Here’s a summary of the ‘snow event’ pilot which only cleared snow when more than 8 cm fell. Satisfaction level for this pilot was 40% with 12% willing to pay for that service. 

​Here’s a chart that shows how the city rated the ‘passability’ of the sidewalks with and without service. 

​The second pilot area was the ‘full service’ pilot that cleared sidewalks after any snowfall. (Side note: I fell within this pilot area). There was an 80% satisfaction level with this service with 59% of residents in the pilot willing to pay for it.  

​Here’s a chart that shows how the city rated the ‘passability’ of the sidewalks with and without service. 

​And here’s a bit more of a breakdown of residents’ preferences before and after the pilot. 

There were a couple of other things staff looked at as well including ‘priority routes’, proactive bylaw, assisted services, and a neighbourhood snowblower program. You can find details about those in the report (pages 4-5). 

A survey and focus groups were run as well. Those results found that 54% of respondents preferred the status quo (no city-led snow clearing).

Here’s the staff summary of the ‘full service’ pilot. 

Staff outline 4 options on pages 20-26 of the report.
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City snow clearing of course would increase the city’s emissions, potentially impacting their GHG targets. However, as staff note, those increases may be balanced out by a decrease in community emissions. 

​While we’re discussing sustainability and environmental considerations, salt usage is another area of potential concern. Staff note the challenges of identifying that balance between city and community usage.

​Now, I did find this bit of information about the cost efficiency of roads versus sidewalks interesting. It does appear that sidewalk snow clearing is not as cost efficient as clearing snow from roads for a few reasons as outlined here. 

That's the main part of the report. There are several appendices that have some interesting information as well but I'll include that in Part 2 of this post, so watch for that if you're interested.