Toronto is not the only city to deal with one of winter’s greatest annoyances: snow clearing.

But there’s a spirit of innovation in other northern locales that Torontonians can only envy.

In Sweden, for example, Stockholm and other cities have adopted a “gender-equal plowing strategy” that aims to give women a better chance of slogging through the white stuff.

Daniel Hellden, a senior city official in Stockholm, said figures show men are more apt to drive while women are more likely to walk or use public transit. So when the snow starts falling, sidewalks, cycling lanes and bus lanes take priority over clearing roads. Daycare centres and schools are served first.

“Men are sitting in the cars, and the women walk, cycle and go by public transportation in much higher amounts. So we’re trying to change” snow-clearing priorities, Hellden said in an interview, referencing local statistics on how people move around the city.

Iceland, with its wealth of hot springs, takes a different approach. Its capital city, Reykjavik, taps into that underground thermal energy and uses the hot springs groundwater to heat its houses. It then pipes the run-off water, still a balmy 30 C, through plastic tubing embedded in the streets and sidewalks to melt the snow.

Throughout Scandinavia, in cities like Oslo, Norway, and Helsinki, Finland, city governments have installed electric elements in sidewalks to keep them ice- and snow-free. Officials say heating the sidewalks is cheaper than clearing the snow and ice. And an added bonus is that hospital visits for slip-and-fall accidents have declined.

When we think Japan, we generally think of blossoms, not snow. But the city of Sapporo, population 2 million, is one of the country’s snowiest cities, with an annual average of six metres. Most of its sidewalks are heated, as is true of other northern Japanese cities.

Montreal considered a proposal in 2015 to install heated sidewalks, but officials decided the cost to install the heaters was prohibitive, and the idea was abandoned.

Other snowy Japanese cities, such as Tsunan, have installed sprinklers or shosetsu (snow-melting pipes, in English) in the middle of its streets to spray warm groundwater over the street to melt snow.

In Minneapolis, Minn., city officials launched a major inspection blitz two years ago aimed at forcing property owners, residents and businesses to clear snow on sidewalks abutting their properties. If snow wasn’t cleared within 24 hours of a storm, property owners were issued “assessments” for the cost of having city workers do the job.

In 2018, the first year inspectors were sent out in force, assessments were five times higher than the previous year.

Toronto property owners are similarly required to clear the snow and ice from their sidewalks. Many will remember the days when Toronto celebs such as cartoonist Ben Wicks, Maple Leaf Wendel Clark and Blue Jay Lloyd Moseby had commercials reminding Torontonians to be nice, clear your ice.

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