Photo by Francis Grunow

To the casual observer, the uncleared sidewalks of Detroit might appear to be a simple failure of resources—a cash-strapped city unable to provide basic services. However, Detroit’s failure to clear sidewalks reveals a more complex structural failure, one that economists recognize as a game theoretic coordination problem. The coordination problem is captured in this simple sentiment: “My neighbor didn’t shovel, so why should I?” Detroit faces additional challenges due to its low density, increasing the average cost of infrastructure maintenance per person. Snowed-in sidewalks are no small problem, either, as snow-logged footpaths decrease their usage and prevent our elderly and disabled neighbors from traversing the city, harming the most disadvantaged among us. When a city cannot coordinate simple services like the clearing of its sidewalks, it is a sign of diminished state capacity: the ability of the government to handle the small, tangible logistics that improve everyday life. It is through robust state capacity, through deeply considerate and effective government service that democratic institutions earn their trust.

If you shovel your sidewalk, I’ll shovel mine

Why do the sidewalks and the side streets in Detroit go uncleared in the Winter? This feels like the practice of a Southern state unaccustomed to snowfall, lacking the necessary infrastructure to prepare their streets for the havoc winter can bring, not the behavior of the only major US city that is bordered by Canada to its South.

The problem is that the city’s residents, businesses, and landlords are individually responsible for snowplowing its sidewalks. These actors have different incentives and capacities to plow their share of the city’s sidewalks, yet must coordinate largely without communicating to see that the whole city is cleared. This is an example of the kind of coordination problems economists use game theory to study. Game theorists design simple games where “players” with different and often competing incentives determine some outcome that affects them jointly. Well known games with suboptimal outcomes include arms races, trade wars, the dynamic between union picket lines and scabs, races to the bottom on prices, and the famous prisoner’s dilemma. All of these games feature different incentives, different actors, and different outcomes, but they share certain incentive structures that result in suboptimal outcomes for their participants, both individually and as a collective, even when everyone is acting in their rational self-interest. For an arms race, the suboptimal outcome is two or more nations spending large percentages of GDP on weapons rather than public goods or lower taxes. In Detroit, the suboptimal outcome is a bevy of unshoveled sidewalks. 

In the game of snow shoveling, the benefit of a cleared sidewalk is non-excludable—everyone in the neighborhood benefits from a walkable path whether they helped clear it or not. This creates a perverse incentive: some neighbors are motivated to “free ride” on the efforts of their neighbors, leaving their share of the sidewalk uncleared. When this happens, those that do shovel must either shovel more or accept walking in the snow. Either way, the non-shoveler is unfairly expending less effort and forcing their neighbors to expend more. 

The problem of coordination and fairness in sidewalk shoveling is compounded in Detroit by the city’s decline in population, leaving much of the city sparsely populated and increasing the total length of sidewalks that individual households and businesses are responsible for–or leaving no one responsible for them at all. It only takes a single empty lot or abandoned building to make shoveling harder for everyone. If enough neighbors opt not to clear their sidewalks, even altruistic neighbors may begin to leave their share uncleared, leading the neighborhood into a deadlock: all of the sidewalks are uncleared, yet no one will start to clear them because they don’t expect anyone else to help. After all, what would be the point?

The high cost of snowy sidewalks

The cost of unplowed sidewalks is not mere inconvenience. Driving and walking around Detroit in the winter, it’s common to see persons walking in the salted and plowed roads to avoid unplowed sidewalks, dangerously sharing the roads with cars driving in the worst conditions they will face all year. You will see this especially for the old and infirm, who must choose between the unlikely but possibly fatal event that they are struck by a vehicle in the street, or the more immediate risk of dangerous falls and painful sprains from walking over the uneven and icy sidewalks. For the disabled that rely on scooters, wheelchairs, and walkers for mobility, even a partially uncleared sidewalk steals any alternative they have: they must walk in the street. 

These observations are underlined by this NIH survey, which found that uncleared sidewalks and especially uncleared curb ramps were the most significant factor in keeping the elderly indoors during the winter, whereas the cold was a relatively minor consideration. There is likewise a risk to Detroiter’s health when clearing the snow. A March 2025 article written by Corewell Health’s Director of Cardiac Rehabilitation and Preventive Cardiology noted that shoveling snow “can place extraordinary demands on the heart, particularly for men who may be habitually sedentary and have underlying cardiovascular disease.” The report cited a 2003 study including some of the same authors that found 36 Detroiters died from cardiac arrest while shoveling the snow in the winter of 2002-2003.

These costs—pedestrians forced into traffic, elderly neighbors confined indoors, and shovelers risking their health—are not distributed evenly, and they are not shared by those who choose not to shovel. The burden of the failure to coordinate falls hardest on those least able to bear it. This is a problem worth solving. It is through solving these idiosyncratic problems, one after another, that great cities are made. There is no shortcut.

Clearing the path forward

Every winter this problem goes unsolved, the most vulnerable Detroiters are forced to choose between dangerous roads and impassable sidewalks. Winter sidewalk clearance is not a problem residents can solve on their own–the incentive structure makes failure the default outcome without intervention. The city’s current solution to the snow shoveler’s dilemma is to fine property owners for failing to clear and salt their sidewalks, but the city has issued only 71 tickets since 2019. Expanding enforcement is difficult because not all Detroiters are well-positioned to pay the fines or to clear their sidewalk, with some Detroiters susceptible to severe health consequences. These challenges suggest that government could be taking a stronger role here.

The city understandably does not have the resources to clear every sidewalk, but it could clear the most important ones. This is the approach taken by Grand Rapids, which clears 200 of the city’s 922 miles of sidewalk with a 24/7 oncall crew in the winter. Over time as the city densifies and revenues strengthen, it can slowly expand its sidewalk clearance program to encompass more and more of the city. And, while there are challenges associated with the city’s current system of issuing fines for uncleared sidewalks, these could be eased by only issuing fines for light snowfall that is likely to result in ice, striking a compromise between the safety of shovelers and the safety of pedestrians. The city could also seek to provide exemptions to residents unable to clear their sidewalks. If these two goals can be met, the city can safely expand fine issuance, offsetting the cost of direct snow clearance and improving sidewalk quality without city expenditure. The earlier cited NIH survey also noted that curb ramps in particular pose challenges in the winter since they can be backed up with large piles of snow from plows, indicating a need for coordination between sidewalk and roadway clearance.

We would be remiss not to mention that improving the city’s density would make clearing snowy sidewalks easier, both because they would be more used and residents more incentivized to clear them, and because the average sidewalk area per citizen would fall, making direct government clearance cheaper on average, too. This is true of the many infrastructure challenges Detroit faces in general, like its over-abundance of roads, its stretched out bus services, or its sprawling above-ground power lines. The more Detroiters there are sharing infrastructure that already exists, the cheaper that infrastructure becomes to maintain and to upgrade. This is a major reason Strong Towns Detroit supports policies aimed at increasing density like the “Let’s Build More Housing, Detroit!” ordinance and the city’s proposed Land Value Tax. These are long-term plans, though, and density does not shovel sidewalks on its own–government-led coordination is still required.

If the snow clearance pilot programs are successful, the city could consider whether a live, online map may be created to let residents know which sidewalks the city has cleared or plans to clear. The city could also indicate with such a map which streets it intends to issue fines on for failure to clear and at what time (current law says properties are to be fined after 48 hours of failing to clear the snow). All of this is data the city would need to track for snow clearing and fining systems, anyways–exposing it publicly would improve the utility of these services as well as government trust. Such a map could later be expanded to include other information, too, like where road or sidewalk maintenance is scheduled to occur. 

The proposed programs of direct sidewalk clearance and expanded fine enforcement may be difficult for the city to meaningfully adopt, but they could start as experiments which the city may expand over time. Success in solving the Snow Shoveler’s dilemma does not need to come all at once. Perfecting the granular service of sidewalk clearance will be an exercise in state capacity and government efficiency for the municipality, the lessons of which will transfer into the other services it provides. By making the city safer for its most vulnerable and more comfortable for us all, Detroit will earn her residents’ trust. Clearing our wintertime sidewalks can be the first step of many more to come down that path.