Boston's Three-Hour Rule for Shoveling Your Sidewalk

Snow isn’t here yet, so this is the easy time to read the rule. In Boston, the sidewalk in front of your house is your job.

The three-hour clock

The city’s winter guide says property owners must clear sidewalks within three hours of snowfall ending, or three hours after sunrise if it snows overnight. The same list asks for a path at least 42 inches wide for people using wheelchairs and pushing strollers. The city adds a note of its own: while the rule is three hours, it tries to be reasonable about when it starts the clock, and says its goal isn’t to fine you.

Whose sidewalk it is

Residents, property owners and businesses are responsible for clearing most sidewalks, the guide says, including the curb ramps around the property. That’s a detail worth noticing on a corner lot, where the curb ramps on your own corner come with the address.

What the city asks beyond the path

Keep snow off the road so it doesn’t get plowed back onto the sidewalk or the curb ramps. Remove ice to bare pavement, or get it as level as you can and treat it with sand, sawdust or something similar. Clear snow that blocks a handicap ramp, a fire hydrant or a storm drain. Don’t leave snow or ice on stairways or fire escapes, since the city says every common exit has to stay usable.

The fines, by property type

The city treats each day you don’t address a violation as a separate and distinct violation. For failing to clear a sidewalk, the schedule is $200 for commercial property, $100 for a residential property with more than 16 units and $50 for a residential property with 16 or fewer units. Pushing snow or ice from private property into the street or onto the sidewalk has its own schedule: for a residential property with 16 or fewer units it’s $100 for more than one cubic yard of snow and $50 for one cubic yard or less, with higher figures for larger residential buildings and for commercial property. The city says it fines itself for city-owned properties too. Its ordinance on snow removal sits in the Boston Code of Ordinances, which the city links from the same page.

What the city is doing while you shovel

During a storm, Public Works de-ices and plows 2,000 lane miles with city and contract equipment across 200 plowing routes, and the city’s rules page says that at full deployment it uses up to 700 pieces of equipment. State agencies clear state-owned roads. Crews plow snow across driveways as they go, and they make repeated passes until the roads are clear, so the pile at the end of your driveway may come back.

Counting the sidewalk before you buy

Sidewalk length doesn’t show up in a listing, and it’s a chore that comes with the deed. How much of it you own changes a lot from one address to the next. If you’re touring this fall and you want to know what winter looks like at a particular address, walk the frontage with me and count it. I’m Diana Kim, REALTOR with eXp Realty, and I work with buyers and sellers across Greater Boston in English and Korean.