Think big treads on winter boots can stop you from slipping on ice? Nope.

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Every year, thousands of Canadians end up on their posteriors  — or worse — after slipping on an icy patch.

In Ontario alone, some 20,000 people end up in the Emergency Room every year after falling on ice. Nearly as many in Alberta too.  And injuries range from simple cuts and bruises, to broken bones,  hip fractures, and even death.

Geoff Fernie is studying how to prevent accidental slips in winter that involves looking at winter footwear. Fernie is the research director at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute where winter boots are tested for traction on ice and snow. The institute has developed a rating system called "rate my treads."

Fernie says most boots on the Canadian market fall woefully short preventing slips. He tells The Current's guest host Piya Chattopadhyay that the tread on a boot doesn't make much of a difference on ice, it's actually best for deep snow.

"When you go and buy snow tires, you want an aggressive masculine tire with a deep tread that will take you through 10 ft of snow and up a mountain," Fernie says.

"But actually when you look at the bottom of a boot you can't really tell ... whether it's going to be a good boot or a bad boot — in most cases."

Fernie says they've studied about 100 winter boots and most of them failed to meet the needs of a typical Canadian winter to prevent slips.

He said about nine boots met a high grade and was based on two kinds of soles.

"If you turn them upside down they either had sort of glistening diamonds sticking out of them …  carbide rough bits, look like very rough sandpaper - they worked by scratching the ice."

Fernie describes the other sole as a "felty kind of Arctic grip stuff which is lots of fibres, I suppose a bit like some animal paws."

The Current's producer Karin Marley tested out boots provided by the Winter Lab at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute.

An alternate solution

We wouldn't need to worry about how effective boot soles worked to prevent spills if ice wasn't an obstacle.

Several European cities figured out a way to prevent ice from appearing during winter by heating their roads and sidewalks. In fact, Montreal is planning on heating the main downtown street Ste-Catherine's in 2018.

That's old news for Holland, Michigan. They began doing this 25 years ago but it's not cheap. Since 1998 the city has spent $8 million US on heating infrastructure. And annually it costs between $20,000 to $80,000 US to operate.

But the mayor of Holland, Nancy DeBoer says it's worth it and the community agrees.

"Each of the businesses downtown pay an assessment every year to keep up the base number of square feet that they have."

DeBoer says the bonus of heating the roads and sidewalks is there are no plows downtown, there's better accessibility for people with disabilities or dog walking and you can enjoy shopping without worrying about ice or snow.

"I saw somebody this past Sunday morning running down the new brick walkway in the residential section in the middle of the snowstorm," she says.

"It was really cool."

Listen to the full segment near the top of this post.

This segment was produced by The Current's Karin Marley and Calgary network producer Michael O'Halloran.