It's so fucking stupid. Snow removal responsibilities basically go along with property. Municipal streets are either done by the city or it just decides "nah" and doesn't do it, sidewalks and bike paths are for the residents (sometimes done by a service if it's a rental building or the owner resident springs for it). Except on city property, where sidewalk and bikepath clearing is, again, the cities responsibility.
Then there's county roads, often they go through the municipality and as such latter won't do it unless getting reimbursed by the county. Then there's state roads, same deal, then there's federal roads who as far as I'm aware just do it themselves mostly, allthough could contract it out, but otherwise same deal as they tend to cross both counties and municipalities.
Then there's train property like crossings, which is the train companies responsibility, and like bus stops, which falls on the bus company and if you have it, tramways and tramstops, that also have to be done by the operating company. Again, unless there's some contract and reimbursement shit going on.
Love to send out like 30 different groups of snow clearing people in a wild mishmash of priorities that leaves a checkerboard of ice patches in the public space
Snow is something that makes a very good case for the opportunity cost of taking up space in an urban setting.
100 people living in an apartment building that takes up 1 unit of area? You need to clear X units of sidewalk. 100 people living in ranch-style houses that take up 5 units of area? You need to clear 5X units of sidewalk plus a bunch extra for everyone's front walkway.
It's the same thing with salting the roads, and also road maintenance, utility lines, and so on. Taking up space that a bunch of people go past means you lengthen everybody else's commute by that much, you pose an obstacle to their movement by that much. If you live alone on an urban lot that could otherwise comfortably house 10 people, you are taking up 10 personal shares of resources.
We could build cities in such a density that the services per citizen are so low that it's a negligible fraction of the workforce. But noooooo, we "don't want to live stacked on top of each other", so we compete to drive up the prices of upkeep and then offload it reactively, through market forces, onto whoever's on the other side.
Green is net resource benefit, red is net resource burden.