City of Waterloo sidewalk snow clearing

Staff report IPPW2023-040 Winter Sidewalk Maintenance Service Enhancement Recommendations will be presented to City of Waterloo Council on Monday, June 26, 2023. The report provides recommendations based on identified issues, community engagement, an internal review by the City's working group, and feedback from Council during an initial workshop and discussion.

The staff report and recommendations will be made publicly available in the Revised Packet for the June 26 Council meeting (page 93 of the document). You can attend our meeting in person, or watch live on YouTube, details are in our Council Meeting Calendar Page.

City staff from Transportation Services; Parks, Forestry & Cemetery Services (PFSC); Municipal Enforcement Services; and Corporate Communications formed a working group to initiate a comprehensive review of the City’s winter sidewalk clearing practices, and presented an advance report to Council on Monday, May 29, 2023. The report is available on page 36 of the May 29, 2023 Council Packet.

As part of this review, the City’s working group identified various challenges with winter sidewalk clearing services including:

• Windrows creating barriers at intersections and bus stops;
• Issues associated with “curb-faced” sidewalk;
• School routes; and
• Ease of reporting, service time, delay in response and incomplete routes

Following a thorough review, staff have identified key conclusions that will enable Council to make informed decisions about any potential adjustments to the current level of winter snow clearing that occurs in Waterloo. Staff have also developed a number of options to address potential service enhancements. Service enhancements can vary in size, timing to implement and cost and as such would have different impacts on future annual property tax rates.

Three potential service options were presented to Council for discussion and prioritization in a Council Workshop. The webstream of the Council workshop video can be viewed on YouTube.

The Winter Sidewalk working group will return to Council on Monday, June 26 with final recommendations.

As part of the Transportation Master Plan update, we asked residents in 2021 to comment on whether they supported recommendation 15:

• Do you support introducing a strategy to prioritize locations for sidewalk snow clearing in the winter?

The large majority of respondents (81.9%) said yes. There were also many write-in comments in support of sidewalk clearing and encouraging a priority system similar to road plowing. The write-in comments can all be found in the Draft Transportation Master Plan Survey Report - 2021.

As part of the 2023 budget process, 48 people attended a hybrid public meeting to provide comment on the budget and their thoughts on priorities for spending. While several themes emerged, the top concern for comments and questions was:

• Sidewalk snow clearance - accessibility and equity issue/lens
  • Sidewalks should be cleared by the City
  • Roads should not be prioritized over sidewalks
  • Not cleaning sidewalks disproportionately impacts low income earners and racialized peoples
  • Disagreement with approach of using municipal enforcement officers to encourage compliance with by-law
  • Shouldn’t rely on neighbours to clear sidewalks, should be done by City
  • How does the City deal with landlords who do not clear the sidewalk in front of their rental properties
  • Individuals should clear their own sidewalk and help others that need assistance

Concerns over increased use of salt to clear snow and ice were also expressed, with sand preferred. The full report to Council on this meeting is available beginning on page 47 of the January 30, 2023 Council Packet.

At the same meeting where the budget feedback information was presented, several delegations presented to Council, speaking on:

• the importance of Active Transportation
• national funding strategies that could be utilized for snow clearing
• how snow clearing models tied to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
• the potential for Ward-by-Ward snow clearing.
• the need for sidewalks to get cleared, and the issue with snow plows creating barriers on the sidewalk and at crosswalks
• the need to clear sidewalks from a disability perspective

There was also a presentation detailing the different areas of the city where private owners were expected to clear their own sidewalks versus where the city took care of snow removal, and potential options for improvement, and a comparison of the City of Waterloo to the City of Guelph’s snow clearing practices and complaints procedure.

Full details can be found in the January 30, 2023 Council Meeting Minutes, or you can view the meeting recording on YouTube.

Most recently, we have been reviewing feedback received as part of the 2023-2026 Strategic Planning consultation process (p.18). Although we continue to work on the analysis of the survey feedback, some of the preliminary findings of the survey include that residents want their future Waterloo to be a walkable and accessible city. The full survey report will be made available on the Strategic Plan project page when available.

Information about our sidewalk snow clearing practices can also be found on the City of Waterloo website.

In our current shared model of sidewalk snow clearing responsibility:

• property owners clear sidewalks at private properties (residential, business/commercial, industrial, etc.)
• the city clears sidewalks at public properties, like parks, creek corridors, trails, walkways, and city buildings and facilities

You can look up properties on our snow clearing responsibility map.

In the City of Waterloo, there are 754 kms of sidewalks, pathways, walkways and multi-use trails. City staff maintain 171 kms, or 23% as of this past winter. Property owners are responsible for 66%, and the remaining 11% are city-owned park trails and walkways that are not maintained through the winter (and have signs posted accordingly). The estimated annual cost of providing this existing service is about $700,000 per year, with existing staff and equipment. The city currently has seven sidewalk plows ("trackless units") in our fleet. At today's rates, a municipal sidewalk plow costs an estimated $200,000. As part of our review, operations staff are looking at other potential equipment options as well. We are also considering the environmental impacts of sidewalk snow clearing operations and methods, in terms of greenhouse gas generation, and increased salt use.

One of the challenges city crews and residents face (a main point identified by the community) is the issue of curb-faced sidewalks, where there is no snow storage space (little or no boulevard) between the road and sidewalk. Snow from the road gets pushed to the sidewalk, and snow from the sidewalk gets pushed back onto the road. There are approximately 34 kms of curb-faced sidewalks in the city; and only 4 km are cleared by the city in our current model. In order to solve the cycle of pushing snow back and forth between sidewalks and roads when there is no storage space, ideally the snow in these areas should be hauled away, an other option currently under review.

While we are not looking at city-wide sidewalk snow clearing at this time, we are looking at possible new sidewalk routes to support access to public transit and other priority destinations, as well as how we can ensure that crossings are accessible by clearing cutouts at intersections and crosswalks in a priority sequence.

Enforcement

Per the snow removal bylaw, property owners must clear their sidewalks (to the full width) within 24 hours after the end of a snow fall or ice build up. If a sidewalk is not cleared 24 hours after snowfall, our municipal enforcement (bylaw) team will issue a notice, requiring the sidewalk to be cleared within the next 24 hours. After this time, it will be cleared by a contractor and billed back to the owner on their property taxes. Some enforcement is proactive, the majority is on a reported basis.