There is a move afoot to gather data about people’s experience booting it around town.

The project is called Winnipeg Winter Walkway Survey. It asks 17 questions, most of them multiple choice (’cause I know how you feel about those long form written questions) and many are optional. The survey asks about the conditions that you experienced while you were out and about, as well as a few questions about yourself and your ability to get around in the winter. People are encouraged to respond multiple times as conditions change throughout the winter.

The project is lead by Gina Sylvestre, a Human Geography professor at the University of Winnipeg who specializes in aging and mobility. The intention is to gather as much info as possible to further research into winter mobility issues in frosty cities like ours, but mostly to provide input to the City of Winnipeg on how to improve winter walking conditions and snow clearing policy. “The more data we are able to collect, the better picture we will have of what affects winter walking conditions in Winnipeg.”

The project only works with lots of input, and so far so good: in the first week there were over 500 responses, with the goal of getting 10,000 by the end of winter.

Bookmark the website if you want to help out. See also Winter Walking in Winnipeg on Facebook.

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If the concept and logo seem vaguely reminiscent of the well-intentioned but much maligned Surefoot! warning system that the City of Winnipeg website hosted in 2012, there is a reason for that: Gina was the force behind the Surefoot! project as well.

Surefoot’s downfall was an inability to provide accurate and timely updates on walking conditions, as well as the obvious limitation that it provided one status for the entire city. With a very limited budget and only a couple of busy undergrad RAs to help manage it, Surefoot! was doomed to fail; and relentless mocking by myself (I feel kind of bad about this now) and others sealed it’s fate. It just looked like another City Hall experiment gone awry at the time.

Winnipeg Winter Walkway Survey is of course something completely different. It’s about gathering information about walking conditions, and there’s no harm in that. All responses are confidential, all demographic questions are optional, and you even get a reference number in case you want to retract your answers (after a night of drunken questionnaire responding I presume).

For more information contact winterwalkway@gmail.com.