In Vienna, VA, we are religious about shoveling the snow off our sidewalks.
God put the snow there.
God will remove it when he’s good and ready.
I tried to take a walk yesterday morning …
… without walking on snow and ice.
But, because I live in the Town of Vienna, that meant spending a lot of time walking in the road.
There’s no requirement to shovel your sidewalk in the Town of Vienna. Unsurprisingly, some sidewalks are shoveled, some aren’t. Which means that you typically can’t walk the length of a block without either walking on an un-shoveled sidewalk, or walking in the road.
This got me to thinking about what the snow-clearance laws are in Northern Virginia. I know there’s no ordinance requiring it in Vienna. But what about the rest of Northern Virginia?
Turns out, Vienna is in the minority. Most of the jurisdictions around here require residents and business owners to shovel their sidewalks promptly after a snowfall.
I find that to be an oddly mixed bag. Loudoun County is in general far more rural than Fairfax County, yet they require snow shoveling while Fairfax does not.
In all cases, the penalties for failure to clear a sidewalk are nugatory, so it’s not clear whether any of the laws are or are not effective. I considered taking a field trip to the People’s Republic of Falls Church to see if their sidewalks really do get cleared or not. But it hardly seems worth it. Give it another few days, and the snow will be gone.
In the end, it’s just another oddity of living in No. Va. These jurisdictions all have the same weather and have pretty much the same population demographics. I’m guessing that the presence or absence of a shoveling ordinance is mostly a matter of historical accident.
In any case, in Vienna, we clear our sidewalks the old fashioned way, via religious observance.
Addendum: Businesses in Vienna VA?
I know there’s no ordinance requiring homeowners to shovel their sidewalks in Vienna, but I was immediately questioned about businesses. You can, and many places do, have different shoveling laws apply for business versus residential.
Old news reporting says that Vienna Town Council turned down any sort of shoveling ordinance in 2011 (Reference The Patch).
And that’s the last Google seems to have heard of it.
A search of MuniCode for Vienna VA for snow yields 13 mentions, none of which have to do with requiring businesses to shovel snow.
A search of the Town Website yields nothing useful, but that’s never definitive.
For sure, the Maple Avenue sidewalks were cleared around here. Here’s Pleasant and Maple, looking west and east.
So, I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be an ordinance requiring it, but something resulted in the clearance of the Maple Avenue sidewalks in my area. This is distinctly different from (say) Nutley, also a multi-lane road, but with large sections of un-shoveled sidewalk.
If it’s due to an ordinance, that ordinance appears well-hidden.
