Of slack shovelers and city spending

Just as Indigenous peoples of the far North have scores of words for snow, the people of Minneapolis have a variety of words for neighbors who don't shovel their sidewalks.

It may seem perverse to broach the subject during the first week of spring, but good citizenship knows no seasons. And proposals for spending the public's money arrive as predictably as robins in March, and a good deal more frequently.

Such a proposal has arrived concerning the problem of unshoveled sidewalks. Before we dig in, let's acknowledge that Minneapolis has an unacceptably large population of residents who feel no particular obligation to keep their walks clear. Especially vexing are those who shovel just the path from their front door to the street. They implicitly acknowledge that snow has fallen, that the snow impedes walking, and that the only walking they care about is their own.

If only that were the sole issue. An unshoveled walk gets in the way not only of walking, but also of sightless navigating, of wheelchair maneuvering and other modes of travel that most of us need not master. When walks are covered in snow, a blind woman using a white cane cannot tell the difference between a residential street and an open field. A man in a wheelchair cannot negotiate the snow and ice, and might choose to risk traveling in the street instead. A person on crutches, a senior with brittle bones, even a young person in good health (for the moment) — all of them have a right to mobility, and they can't exercise that right safely when the public sidewalks are full of snow. Or covered in the ice that unshoveled snow will become.

Accordingly, a Minneapolis ordinance requires city residents and businesses to shovel their walks promptly after the snow falls. And while city employees make some effort to enforce that ordinance, there are too many miles of sidewalks (nearly 2,000) for their inspections to make a dent. Residents can e-mail the city's 311 service to complain about their neighbors' walks, but they can't do so anonymously. What's more, it takes a week or longer before contractors arrive to clear the snow — by which time it may have snowed again, resetting the timeline.

A proposal now making its way into the city's budget process envisions a new approach: The city would take over primary responsibility for clearing sidewalks. It is an expensive proposition, estimated to cost as much as $20 million per year, but it would put the public walkways on a par with the public network of roads and streets. It would answer the legitimate needs of people unable to shovel their walks. And it would affirm that people who do not own cars are as deserving of respect as those who do.

Even so, it strikes us as a costly, systemwide solution to a local, individual problem. Before the city commits to a major initiative, we'd like to see a more modest experiment: crowdsourcing. Invite neighbors to help out neighbors by clearing a walk that hasn't been shoveled.

Of course, in an ideal Minneapolis, everyone capable of shoveling their own walks would do so, and neighbors would help neighbors without being asked. Some already do. With a little recognition and encouragement, they could apply a grass-roots solution to the problem of icy, snowy sidewalks.