Seeing people walking in the wonderfully-cleared Mass Ave PBL is not a great argument for more PBLs... it's a great argument for municipal sidewalk clearance program.

@bikepedantic My old city has had good results with their municipal snow removal pilot and they expanded it this winter. It covers ~20% of the cities streets, mostly major streets and retail corridors, but they only do it for snowfalls of 2” or more. I would love to see a similar effort here.

https://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/2022/12/almost-20-of-all-grand-rapids-sidewalks-will-be-cleared-of-snow-as-part-of-city-program-expansion.html?outputType=amp

They also have a large snow melt system for the downtown area, which is common in West Michigan, but I don’t recall seeing them used in New England.