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As the partner of one of those sidewalk snow plowers I can tell you first hand it is not an easy job. To the person who says these workers are not smart my guy has a master's degree in business and is just doing this temp work until he finds something in his field.

Last week we had two piggy back storms, the workers are called when 2cm are on the ground, their route takes on average 12 hours from start to finish. So if you are in the area where they began to plow during the first storm your sidewalks accumulated more than someone at the end of the route. The third issue was the freezing rain mucking up any progress they made with the snow. So he worked 4 days in a row for 12-14 hours trying to clear the mess. Homeowners and business should take responsibility to clear in front of their property. The plows can only do so much and cannot completely clear all major walkways of all the snow and ice.

I am amazed as someone who walks to work at the irresponsible homeowners and businesses who don't even salt their icy walkways.
 
So if you are in the area where they began to plow during the first storm your sidewalks accumulated more than someone at the end of the route.
End of route? It's been about a week since there's been any snow, and there are sidewalks in my neighbourhood that still haven't had any attempt to clear them. (and those that have, have been cleared by the owners).

Though by far the worst sidewalks I've seen - that have been cleared, are along city-owned property! It looks like in places, rather than clearing, they simply tried to dump a lot of salt. However 30 cm of snow and a lot of salt, in the very cold temperatures we had, simply makes unstable mushy snow, rather than the hard-packed snow that builds up when a resident doesn't clear their walk. Walking down Woodbine south of Danforth was virtually impassable all week, along the city-owned sections.
 
End of route? It's been about a week since there's been any snow, and there are sidewalks in my neighbourhood that still haven't had any attempt to clear them. (and those that have, have been cleared by the owners).


They don't plow every sidewalk in the city, just the main Streets. For example Lakeshore, Parliament and Front are on his route.

The homeowners and business owners are supposed to do their part too.
It sickens me to see entire apartment and condo buildings not even salting outside their places. I've seem far too many elderly struggling to walk the streets, they look terrified. People need to step up the city cannot do it all.
 
People need to step up the city cannot do it all.
Ah ...

Agreed - but as I said, by far the worst sidewalks I've seen are ones where the sidewalk is adjacent to city land. Where there's still 25 cm of loose snow, 5 days after it has snowed.
 
Though this thread is a bit out-of-use, it seems a good place to put this Budget Briefing Note on snow clearing on park walkways. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-162884.pdf I think the City needs to look closely at pedestrian walking patterns to see which park pathways are heavily used and should thus get priority. I would say (well, I do live downtown!) that paths in most downtown parks are really similar to sidewalks and as the Cirt has to (and does) clear the sidewalks around parks they really need to do some (or more) clearing of paths that cross parks too. Though they may have managed to expand the clearing in St James Park this year, until last year they cleared only one of the 'diagonal paths" but not the other - weird!
 
Though this thread is a bit out-of-use, it seems a good place to put this Budget Briefing Note on snow clearing on park walkways. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-162884.pdf I think the City needs to look closely at pedestrian walking patterns to see which park pathways are heavily used and should thus get priority. I would say (well, I do live downtown!) that paths in most downtown parks are really similar to sidewalks and as the Cirt has to (and does) clear the sidewalks around parks they really need to do some (or more) clearing of paths that cross parks too. Though they may have managed to expand the clearing in St James Park this year, until last year they cleared only one of the 'diagonal paths" but not the other - weird!
I agree. Priority needs to go to where the foot traffic is and to important walking routes across the city. A lot of walkways in parks and ravines in the suburbs are well travelled too.
 
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Seeing that this thread was resurrected, could cross-post this here as it is relevant:

 
The Martin Goodman Trail down around here gets priority clearing, it seems. Like they were out twice or more yesterday during the storm.

I walk on the boardwalk though anyway so 🤷‍♂️
I was out there yesterday with my fellow true Canucks.

There were some cyclists using the freshly-cleared trail as well.
 

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