In Cleveland the public sidewalk in front of your house has to be clear before 9:00 a.m. every day — not within 24 hours of the storm. That is a daily obligation, it is enforced by a charge that can become a lien on the property, and it is almost always quoted as separate work from the driveway.
Ohio Revised Code 723.011 lets a municipality require owners and occupants to keep sidewalks, curbs and gutters free from snow. It does not create the duty itself — the local ordinance does — which is why the answer changes at every city line in this metro.
Cleveland: before 9 a.m. daily. Westlake: ordinarily within 24 hours, to a minimum width of eighteen inches, with the city billing $25 per 50 feet if it does the work. Lakewood: 24 hours. Shaker Heights: by 9 a.m. the day after a major snowfall, with the city plowing sidewalks itself if snow reaches six inches. Cleveland Heights, Mentor and Solon state the duty with no deadline at all. The full table →
A sidewalk is not a small driveway. It is a long thin surface with a curb on one side and a lawn on the other, which makes it awkward for a plow blade and natural for a blower or a shovel crew — and it refreezes faster than the driveway does, because it is thin concrete sitting on cold ground with nothing over it.
Two Cleveland-specific details belong in the scope. The ordinance allows covering with ashes, sand or similar where full removal is genuinely impossible — which is the ordinance quietly acknowledging that a sheet of bonded ice is not shovelable. And Chagrin Falls explicitly extends the duty to keeping curb ramps, crosswalks and bus stops passable, which is real added footage on a corner property.
Steps, a walk to a side door and a path to the trash carts are usually separate line items and worth naming when you ask for a quote rather than assuming they are included.
Municipal salt restraint here is real and visible. Shaker Heights salts only major intersections, rarely side and secondary roads, and applies no salt at all between midnight and 4 a.m. Lakewood salts within roughly 100 feet of side-street intersections and on hills, and not much beyond.
For a property owner that has a direct consequence: on a residential street in either city, the ice on the road at 6 a.m. is not going to be dealt with by anyone, and the condition of your own walk is entirely your arrangement. What a proper ice-control plan looks like →
How many feet of public sidewalk, whether it is a corner, and whether steps and a side path are included. It is separate work and it should be separately priced.
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