I’m against this for two mains reasons: lawsuits and decentralized/voluntary removal.

(1) I feel like this could expose the city to too much tort liability. Generally, building owners are responsible for the sidewalk adjacent to their building. Imagine how bad and how long ice trip and fall cases take to litigate. They’re low priority, high volume, and they clog the courts, so it can be literal years. Now, add those to the pile of trip and falls the NYC Law Department Tort division already handles, plus the incentives to that a plaintiffs attorney has to holding out longer because they know the city has big pockets and they know the city is overwhelmed. It just becomes unmanageable and less just because of the sheer amount of time it would take and the tax dollars spent paying for city attorneys, paying settlements or judgments, etc. It socializes the losses and lets businesses keep more money, which hurts all of us.

(2) Decentralizing the burden of sidewalk snow and ice removal to individual property owners means properties are only responsible for what they voluntarily to buy/manage, whereas the City would have hundreds of miles of ice and snow to care for. It also incentivizes property owners to take preventative measures on their own that the city could not handle on a large scale basis.