In Montreal, the city cleans the sidewalks. They obviously don’t feel it’s the natural obligation of the homeowner, and I don’t see why they’re wrong.
In most of Canada the sidewalk is not an easement over private property but part of public roadway.
The fact that you as a pedestrian gets some third party benefit from the city’s requirements has nothing to do with us.
Not really, the public has an easement on your sidewalk. The city’s responsibility is to protect that easement for the public.
You’ve put the wagon before the horse.
The reason in Quebec they don’t insist that the sidewalk is yours is because they don’t need to, because they clean it anyhow.
In NY, they want to have it both ways. They want the homeowner to be responsible to maintain what is essentially public property, so they use the legal mechanism of saying it’s private property with a public easement. There’s nothing inherently correct in that legal maneuver, so although I do legally need to clean the sidewalk, it remains true that it’s not inherently my responsibility, it’s governmentally mandated.