The City of Buffalo Common Council has decided to hold a special session to hear from residents about the challenges they’ve faced this winter while bus stops, bus shelters, sidewalks and curbs have gone uncleared for weeks.
If you’re unsure how you feel about it, may we remind you to check out the perspective of someone who needs and legally deserves safe access to our curbs and sidewalks in this well-written piece by Sean Kirst of the Buffalo News:
The status quo simply does not work. In an ideal world, all business and residential property owners would do their required shoveling, even after the plow came and buried the intersection. Clearly, they do not. We can throw our hands up in the air angrily about that, but it doesn’t make life any easier for those who need clear sidewalks, curbs and bus stops to get around safely.
Now is a critical moment to be heard directly by City Hall. Rochester and Syracuse already do this. Why not us?
Please join us in helping the Common Council understand this very real need so that they’re ready to properly form a budget that includes this work. Feel free to use any of these talking points when you register to speak (Before 2:00PM Wednesday), and when you do speak at the event Wednesday night:
– Buffalo should develop a data-driven framework to identify the sidewalks most in need of clearance after a snow event.
-Traffic flow and pedestrian activity should be analyzed together with heavily-trafficked roads and locations that are active for pedestrians, like schools and transit stops.
– The findings should inform a connected network of sidewalks that will be cleared following a snow event allowing for better mobility of pedestrians all around the city.
– Syracuse has done this for up to 100 miles of sidewalks in their city for a cost of $650,000 annually and Buffalo should follow suit.
What else can you do?
Contact your city council representative! Ask them to also commit to supporting municipal snow removal in this year’s budget.
Contact the mayor’s office! Ask him to also commit to supporting municipal snow removal in this year’s budget.
Call 311 wherever you see a neglected (or worse, buried by a private plow service) sidewalk, curb ramp, bus shelter, bus stop! 311 is effective in getting things done, and it’s also a data mine. The more calls it receives for things like this, the more likely it will be prioritized in future budgets.
This is a matter of protecting our citizens, our neighbors, and keeping the city accessible to everyone, not just those who own cars.
There are pages and accounts and groups all over social media where people are discussing this. Please share this article and this call to action with them, but remember that your representative isn’t crawling social media to see what they should do next. They should be contacted directly.