>>Have you ever been to Venice.
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>Unfortunately, I've been a dozen times to Italy, but each time it was a brief smuggling shopping trip to the nearest city across, Trieste or Gorizia.
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>But I know the feeling - most of the cities here now have a strictly pedestrian area downtown. The main street in my town hasn't had four-wheeled traffic in decades, apart from the snow plows. Ough - ploughs, that is.
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>>The thing I liked a lot about it was spending several days not seeing or having to avoid cars when walking around the city.
>>I'm feeling extra car animosity at the moment as we have had a long freeze and the roads have been cleared of ice and snow for cars but the pavements are an icy death trap.
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>Here it's up to the house owner to clean up or pay up, but the newly formed communal police (you can see the deadly influence of the EU in the number of separate police formations that sprout) hasn't reached that paragraph in their reading, so it depends. In my street, the so-called pavement (we're waiting for our 100m of asphalt for about 20 years now) is all in glazed potholes, while what sidewalk we have (i.e. what people have made themselves) is somewhere dry clean, somewhere a deathtrap. Generally you want to walk on the edge so at least one foot is on the snow. Though, yesterday morning we walked some 3km home, and didn't as much as slip. But we got the technique and were alone - having to maneuver around other pedestrians would make it quite dangerous.
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>Specially that the soil is basically soft here, so any pavement you put is bound to develop a slope over the years, and those two degrees are actually the most dangerous, because you don't really notice them until the gravity takes you to look closer.

If you don't clear your path what do you have to pay ?