Long story short, in Pennsylvania people shovel their sidewalks when it snows and in Tbilisi they don’t. Where I’m from in the US, those that own property in widely travelled areas such as city sidewalks are morally if not legally obliged to provide a path for the general public across that bit of sidewalk that stretches across the front of his/her property. Generally speaking, this is accomplished by some combination of the 4 “S’s” of snow management: shoveling, snowblowing, salting, and sanding.
Whenever it snows more than an inch or two, I go out to shovel the driveway, and then we’d make the trek to my mother-in-law’s house to help out over there. And if memory serves the snow at her place was always at least waist-deep (or so it seems, anyway). Our tools were simple: a flat, metal shovel that was heavy and small, and a wide plastic shovel that was cheap and that held so much snow that it was unmanageable when fully loaded. We shoveled for hours before going inside to warm up and dry off before wandering back home before dark (OK, maybe not for HOURS, but my back always thought so).
So the question you might ask is, why do people do this? Why do they drag out their snow removal equipment (if it’s not shovels, it’s a cranky snow blower that has spent the last six months acting as a portable shelf in the garage and has to be itself unburied before it can be used. And that’s assuming the damn thing will start which is, at best a 50-50 proposition.) and take to the streets to remove every last snow flake from every concrete surface? It’s not out of philanthropy. No – in lots of places, if you don’t shovel your property, the law will come for you. My father always said you’d get a ticket if you didn’t shovel out in front of your house. I don’t know how true that is, but everyone seemed to be out shoveling, right after a snowstorm, so they must have believed it, too.
I do know that if you have a business, you are responsible for keeping the sidewalks in front of your property clean and litter free throughout the year, and maintaining a snow-free safe path in winter, and the Department of Sanitation issues heavy fines if you fail in these duties.
It’s actually one of the few community things that people still do in America – at least, in the heavily residential areas. Shoveling snow is one of the few times I’d see my neighbors. It was always kind of nice to see people out shoveling, everyone in the community pitching in.
And sure, we could have just paid a tax and let the government hire snowshovellers, but in a rare display of good sense our public officials apparently decided that that would be a horrifically inefficient way of coping with snowstorms, which are sporadic and hard to predict, and it would be much better to just let residents do it themselves.
As for people who can’t shovel for themselves? Well, some have kind-hearted son-in-laws and grandsons (ahem) who will do it for them. For others, local kids go around with shovels, offering to shovel driveways and sidewalks for a nominal fee. It’s good for kids to develop a work ethic, as Newt Gingrich might argue. The system just sort of works.
And yeah, there are always a few people who don’t take care of their property. You can tell because pedestrians beat down a path, so these are the people with packed ice and sludge in front of their property instead of a proper walkway. Maybe you’ll find one of these every few blocks, and it’s annoying, but it’s a minor annoyance.
In Tbilisi, every sidewalk is like that.
Every sidewalk is covered in slush from curb to building – that is to say, when there is a sidewalk at all. In most places the snow is packed down into ice, which is slippery and makes walking difficult. Georgians seem to be used to it, but it takes me at least twice as long to cover the same ground as it normally does. Little old bebias (grandmothers), and women in four-inch-heels, are leaving me in the dust.
No one shovels any paths. As a result, you have hazardous and difficult terrain throughout the city. Now I don’t know if Tbilisi has any municipal rules dealing with snow. If I were to guess, I’d say that Tbilisi deals with snow the same way Tbilisi deals with stray dogs, burning plastic, cars parked on sidewalks, litter, and all of the other stuff that happens in cities when they become a lawless free-for-all: by ignoring the problem.
I mean, Georgians have other stuff to worry about, right? Our neighborhood, Nutsubidze Plateau II, lost water for a couple of days this week because of frozen pipes. Surely that ought to take preference over making walking easier for pedestrians in Tbilisi.
On the other hand, given the high levels of unemployment in Georgia, there can be no shortage of able-bodied individuals who would love to shovel snow to make a few laris or to help out their aunts-uncles-cousins. So why not just make a rule saying that property owners have to make sure their property has a path through the snow?
Well, this gets into a much deeper difference between America and Georgia. Georgia just has fewer laws and fewer lawsuits. If you slip and fall on the sidewalk and break a bone or something, you can’t sue the city for allowing ice to remain on the road – in America, you’d be surrounded by lawyers before your second bounce. Georgians are less litigious, and there are also fewer rules governing behavior.
Walking around Tbilisi, even when it hasn’t been snowing, demonstrates this. There are holes everywhere. There are ledges without guard rails. There are open stairs that someone could easily fall into. The kind of stuff that you would just never see in the US. OSHA here is a dog’s name, I think. It’s essentially a much more Libertarian society here than in America.
This leads to the title of this piece: Tragedy of the Commons. One of the issues that is often discussed in areas like the theory of government is a problem called the “Tragedy of the Commons.” This “tragedy” arises when a group of people share a common property, and they let it fall apart because no one takes responsibility for taking care of it. In theory, one of the reasons why government arises is that people need to delegate responsibility for taking care of common properties. (Originally this term was used to explain overfeeding on shared grasslands, but it can be expanded to cover all sorts of interesting phenomena).
So one of the downsides of having more freedom is that overall, if people are free to disrespect a common area, they will. If there is no rule saying that people must shovel their sidewalks, then generally they won’t shovel their sidewalks. If there is no rule saying that you can’t park on a sidewalk, then generally people will park on the sidewalks and make it so that pedestrians have to walk in the streets.
And so it happens in Georgia – Georgia, whose beautiful landscape is all too often marred by the ubiquitous plastic shopping bags that dot the hillsides like a fungal infection, whose streets and sidewalks are a constant nightmare for pedestrians, whose air and waters are polluted, whose dogs roam free and attack at random, whose restaurants leave all their patrons smelling like an ash tray for days…
(Which is not to say that Georgians have no rules at all. There are no seats reserved for the elderly or disabled in Georgian buses, and yet on every Georgian bus, unwritten social rules guarantee that the all of the elderly, disabled, and pregnant (and even in some cases mothers with children) passengers on the bus get seats while the young and healthy stand. Georgians are very personally respectful in a number of different sorts of social contexts.)
Ideologically, there are two ways to deal with the Tragedy of the Commons – either abolish common property altogether (i.e. privatize all land, streets, etc. – a radical and untried solution that seems to have some obvious flaws that would need to be worked out) or establish a government to govern the common property. The government makes rules, the rules are backed by fines and enforced by law enforcement officials who ultimately have the authority to take away peoples’ freedom entirely – for instance, by jailing them – if they do not comply with the rules.
Or, if neither of those seem palatable to you, you could just not deal with the Tragedy of the Commons. You could just get used to living with the smells of burning plastic and dog poop and buy yourself a nice pair of cleats to navigate the city streets throughout February. You could buy yourself a car – the upside is that you’d never have to worry about parking, as long as there are sidewalks where you’re going!
One final side-note. I noticed that all of Tbilisi’s… well, I call them “flagship streets,” while others call them “Western streets” – places where extensive renovation and modernization and Europization have gone on – have physical barriers placed strategically along the edge of the sidewalks to physically prevent cars from parking on them. I bet it never even occurred to the people at City Hall that they could just outlaw cars on sidewalks and that fines would not only provide a little more income for the city but just might help to keep cars on the road instead of the sidewalks.
But it is interesting how Georgia is moving, in its own (very unique) way, towards a more Western way of doing things.
Thanks for reading.
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