I live about 90 minutes north of Lansing in a town at about the same latitude as Toronto. Weather-wise, the problem isn't the ice. It's the snow accumulation, the cold. For about 3 months out of the year, you're lucky if it's at -7 C or higher.

It's also just that nothing is structured for it. Homes are built relatively far away from businesses and shops due to zoning, and stroads are the common way to get between the two. And where the stroads end, rural roads begin. It's structured not to be walkable not just at the large city level, but at the small city and town level, too. Our infrastructure is dictated by what the people in the 1940s thought, and they were extremely wrong about a great many things.