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Mandatory Snow Clearing

This is about the mandatory cleaning of snow and ice on sidewalks and other public or private passageways. §1. To put it in perspective, let's consider the following scenarios. In all cases, we're not in 2026 and in modern civilization, but in 1900, somewhere on Earth: 1. You have to use a certain street to reach your desired destination. You're on foot. If what you fear is robbers and murderers, you assess the dangerousness of the neighborhood, and, based on your reasoning and your survival instincts, you take that way, or you avoid it. If what you fear is slipping and falling because of ice and snow, you also use your judgment and take the appropriate action. 2. You have to visit someone and reach to their door through a pathway that goes through their front yard. You assess the risk: if you might break your neck, you reconsider and possibly change your mind. If you're a postman, you don't deliver the mail and return it to the post office with a note: “Could not deliver: Mad dog, snow and ice, etc.” 3. You want to enter the local branch of your bank or a local store. To reach the door, you have to climb a few steps, which might be slippery, or the lighting might not be enough. If you consider it to be risky, you change your mind and turn around. §2. Fast-forward to today. 1. If you break your neck by slipping on the sidewalk in wintertime, you sue the owner of the house bordered by that sidewalk, even if the sidewalk itself isn't private property. 2. If you break your neck by slipping on someone's property, you sue them. 3. If you break your neck by slipping while entering or exiting your bank or your local store, you sue them. That's because “civilization” has made laws meant to protect people from their own stupidity. You don't need to use your brains—the law is protecting you. It can't protect you from robbery and murder, but if someone doesn't shovel the snow and doesn't melt the ice from the sidewalk or porch, they're liable! §3. Let's consider this situation from several angles. 1. As a driver, if the roadway cannot be used because of snow, the City is responsible, but you generally don't sue them because there is the excuse that “it snowed too much.” If your car breaks because of potholes, some people might choose to sue the City, because the roadway belongs to the city. As a pedestrian, however, the situation is half-reversed. If you break your neck on a sidewalk because of potholes, you might try your chance suing the City, which owns the sidewalk. But if you break your neck on a sidewalk because of snow and ice, you sue the owner of the house that borders the sidewalk, despite the lack of ownership from them, but the law gives you this right! HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE? 2. Unless it's a trap, how can anyone else be responsible if you're stupid enough to slip and fall in their private yard? Facing such a risk of being sued should have led people to refuse any visits at all! 3. A small shop or a small bank office can barely have the employees to operate the respective business. How are they supposed to shovel the snow in front of their shop during business hours or, even worse, outside business hours? I've seen bank security personnel scooping the snow, thus endangering the security of the bank. §4. For the case of a public sidewalk bordering a private property, the law is more than unjust: a. It's absurd to be responsible for the safety of a sidewalk that doesn't belong to you in any possible way. It's the City to fix potholes on the sidewalk, but someone else's task to clean the snow? BASED ON WHAT LEGAL PRINCIPLE? b. In some jurisdictions (Germany, if I'm not wrong), the responsible party is the owner of the building or the owner of the ground floor, if other floors have different owners. WHERE IS THE LOGIC IN THAT? c. The owners or the tenants (of the ground floor) might be on holiday in Switzerland when the snow starts. How could they be home to clean the snow? d. The owners or the tenants (of the ground floor) might be in the hospital when the snow starts. How could they be home to clean the snow? d. The owners or the tenants (of the ground floor) might be at work or commuting to work when the snow starts. How are they supposed to clean the snow? e. The owners or the tenants (of the ground floor) might be 80 or 90 years old or have a disability. How are they supposed to clean the snow? Such “modern laws,” by trying to protect the imbeciles and to pass to others the responsibility of stupid personal actions, create more injustice than they repair! I dare say that, if such laws were fully observed and penalties applied, this would create almost a regime of terror! §5. Any normal-minded society would do otherwise: 1. As long as everyone pays property taxes, and as long as the sidewalks are the City's property, the responsibility rests with the city. Therefore, the City should pay someone to do the cleaning of the sidewalk, the same way they pay to clean the roadway, and the same way they clean the dirt on the sidewalk (when they do that, twice a year at least). 2. Alternatively, if the responsibility and the financial burden are transferred, albeit without any ethical ground, to the locals, then the homeowners' association should make sure some service provider takes care of this task. Individual houses should have the option to choose among several service providers. Alternatively, they could sign a statement that makes them personally responsible for the respective cleaning. However, as long as this second choice is a forced one and refers to sidewalks that are neither owned nor leased from the City, a supplementary legal provision should be made: if someone breaks their neck, it's still the City to be sued, as the legal owner. The owner of the adjoining house could only bear civil responsibility if they have not fulfilled the obligation to pay a certified service provider to the job or if they tasked themselves with it. §6. Meanwhile, as proof that nobody understands the rationale of such laws and regulations, here's a case from Germany. - On private properties, people seek to avoid legal consequences by hanging up signs that read, “Privatgrund/Privatweg. Kein Winterdienst. Betreten auf eigene Gefahr.” - Public parks, too, can have signs with “Kein Winterdienst! Betreten auf eigene Gefahr.” - However, I've seen school grounds displaying the same sign, which makes no sense and should have zero legal bearing. Why? Because, unless the school is officially closed for bad weather, children are mandated by law to go to school. And there's no way to go to the school door other than by using grounds labeled “Kein Winterdienst! Betreten auf eigene Gefahr.” Once people are literally forced to use that way, responsibility cannot be denied. Here's a random mention of such legislation that distinguishes between private grounds and public grounds and the use of signage: Privatweg: Wie sieht es hier mit dem Winterdienst aus? https://www.alfa24.de/privatweg-wie-sieht-es-hier-mit-dem-winterdienst-aus/ Reicht ein Schild aus, um nicht haftbar gemacht zu werden? Die Frage, ob das Schild ausreicht, nicht haftbar gemacht zu werden, hängt immer von den jeweiligen Umständen ab. Wird der reine Privatweg nicht für den allgemeinen Verkehr benötigt, dann muss nicht geräumt werden. Dies bestätigte erst das Oberlandesgericht Hamm. (AZ 6 U 178/12). Anders sieht es aus, wenn der Weg der einzige Zugang zum Grundstück ist. Hier reicht ein Schild nicht aus, sondern es muss geräumt und gestreut werden. Das entschied das Oberlandesgericht Saarbrücken (AZ 4 U 64/03-116). Doch auch den Fußgänger wird hier eine Mitschuld angerechnet, denn das Schild sollte auch als Warnung aufgenommen werden. Sobald man darauf hingewiesen wird, dass hier nicht oder nur teilweise geräumt wird, muss der Passant ein vorsichtig sein. Missachtet er dies, kann eine Mitschuld begründet werden. The “partial liability” of “pedestrians who do not exercise caution when warned” is specific to Germany. In Germany, when two cars collide, the guilt is almost never assigned 100% to only one of the drivers, not even in rear-end crashes. Courts often set responsibilities to 50%/50%, 60%/40%, 70%/30%, or 80%/20%. §7. Prove me wrong regarding my above ratiocinations.
I won't try to "prove you wrong" because your core argument—that these laws often create moral hazards, arbitrary burdens, and logical inconsistencies—is fundamentally sound. You've identified genuine tensions in tort law that legal scholars have debated for decades.
However, I want to offer some structural and historical context that complicates your critique without invalidating it.

The Historical Shift You Described Has a Name

The transition from your §1 to §2 isn't arbitrary "civilizational decline" but tracks the rise of industrial-era tort law (roughly 1870-1940). The 1900 scenarios you described worked in societies where:
  • Most people walked or used horse-drawn transport (slower speeds, lower kinetic energy)
  • Medical costs were low (often: death or recovery, little middle ground)
  • There was no insurance industry to spread risk
  • Social welfare didn't exist; an injury meant destitution
When industrialization created faster dangers (trains, automobiles, machinery), higher medical costs, and urban density, legal systems evolved strict liability doctrines and premises liability rules. The snow-shoveling laws are downstream of this shift—they're not about "protecting people from their own stupidity" but about allocating the costs of accidents to those best positioned to prevent them or bear the financial risk.
Whether this allocation is fair in the specific case of residential sidewalks is your valid critique. Whether it's efficient is an empirical question.

The "Why Ground Floor?" Question (§4b)

You asked where the logic is. In German law (and similar systems), this derives from possessory control, not ownership per se. The ground-floor occupant:
  • Physically controls the access point
  • Benefits most directly from pedestrian traffic (customers, deliveries, property values)
  • Can most easily monitor conditions
This is administratively convenient, not philosophically pure. You're right that it breaks down at the edges (elderly owners, absent tenants, etc.)—but all bright-line rules break down at edges. The alternative is case-by-case adjudication, which has its own costs.

The Asymmetry You Noticed (§3.1)

You're correct that roads and sidewalks are treated differently. This reflects:
  1. Scale: Cities can plow centralized road networks; decentralized sidewalk clearing by property owners parallelizes the labor
  2. Political economy: Homeowners are a diffuse, unorganized group compared to motorists' lobbies; drivers demand road service, while sidewalk liability is "imposed" on property owners who lack equivalent political leverage
  3. Historical path dependence: Many of these rules originated when sidewalks were de facto maintained by adjacent property owners (pre-municipalization), and were never fully socialized
Your §5.1 proposal (city responsibility) is coherent but faces the public choice problem: taxpayers resist visible tax increases for invisible services, while imposing costs on property owners hides the expenditure.

The German Signage Paradox (§6)

You've identified a genuine contradiction. The German court rulings you cited (OLG Hamm vs. OLG Saarbrücken) show courts struggling with the necessity exception: if a path is the only access, warning signs don't absolve the duty to clear. This isn't irrational—it's courts recognizing that meaningful consent requires meaningful alternatives.
The school example you give is even sharper: when attendance is compulsory, the "enter at your own risk" sign becomes legally meaningless because the state has eliminated the choice it purports to warn about. This is a reductio of the signage logic, not a failure of logic itself.

Where Your Argument Could Be Stronger

You frame this as "protecting imbeciles," but consider:
  • Information asymmetry: The pedestrian may not see ice under fresh snow; the resident has had hours/days to observe conditions
  • Collective action: If every pedestrian must individually "assess" every segment of every sidewalk, transaction costs explode; assigning responsibility to property owners creates a clear duty structure
  • Insurance markets: These laws enable predictable liability, which enables insurance, which enables risk-pooling
These aren't decisive counterarguments, but they suggest the laws aren't purely paternalistic.

Where Your Argument Is Devastating

  • The absence of ownership creating liability is genuinely anomalous in property law
  • The physical impossibility scenarios (§4c-e) reveal the rule's indifference to individual circumstances
  • The political economy (imposing costs on property owners rather than funding public services) is indeed a form of hidden taxation without representation

A Synthesis

Your "regime of terror" hyperbole aside (§4), you've identified a second-best solution that has calcified into an unjust first-best. The original logic—decentralize maintenance to those with local knowledge and control—made sense in an era of weak municipal capacity. Maintaining it in an era of professionalized services and aging populations creates the absurdities you document.
Your §5 proposals (municipal responsibility or opt-in certified services) represent the direction many jurisdictions are actually moving—though implementation is patchy because of the political economy you correctly diagnose.
The laws aren't "protecting people from their own stupidity." They're allocating accident costs in a world where accidents are expensive and someone must pay. That the allocation is often arbitrary, inefficient, and unjust doesn't make it purposeless—it makes it contested, as your analysis ably demonstrates.