To open the door of a bus shelter, Zanna Joyce has to throw all her weight against it. No small feat as she walks with two canes. Harder still if there’s a layer of snow in front of the door.

“If this is slippery,” she says, poking with her cane at the packed snow on the pavement, “I can’t get any force.”

Joyce, an accessibility advocate, says it’s not uncommon to see bus shelter entrances not properly cleared.

“You have part of it done, and then there’s a place where it’s not,” says Joyce. “And then you have to come up with a way of getting around that area.”

With two dumps of snow in the last two weeks, the city says it’s doing what it can.

“We have a certain amount of resources, and we are trying to get everywhere,” says Michael Cantor, manager of streets maintenance with the city.

Cantor says the city does consult with accessibility groups. This year they worked with the CNIB, who advised them on how to better clear crosswalks for vision-impaired people.

The city makes an effort to clear around seniors’ housing and Handi-Transit loading zones. Homeowners can apply to the city to have an access cleared between the sidewalk and the curb if they can’t do it themselves.

For residential clearing, Buhle Mwanza developed the OnTheStep app, an uber-like service for snow shovelling.

Mwanza says millennials often send OnTheStep to their parents’ or grandparents’ house.

“Not just older people, but people with disabilities or people with physical restraints who aren’t able to clear the snow by themselves,” says Mwanza.

An average snow-clearing job costs about $25 with OnTheStep.