[jbob2000]

Mother nature does not want sidewalks to exist. A smooth, even surface is not something that exists naturally, it requires us to constantly evaluate, design, and repair. You can fix a sidewalk one year, then winter happens and the ground up-heaves and shifts the concrete, and it'll be another 5 years before you can circle back to do maintenance. Or someone plants a tree in their yard and over time the roots grow under the pavement. And as you already identified, you can't depend on people to maintain the sidewalks in front of their property.

We will never have perfect sidewalks, it's a noble goal, but it's pie-in-the-sky thinking to want perfect sidewalks. Instead, we should be building better accessibility devices, ones that can navigate tough terrain. Why are the wheels on mobility devices so damn small? Can they be made to be swappable so you can put on the outdoor wheels when you're travelling, and indoor ones when you want something smooth and quiet?

[tallblondeguy]

> We will never have perfect sidewalks, it's a noble goal, but it's pie-in-the-sky thinking to want perfect sidewalks.

We'll never have perfect anything. But I think you're being more than a bit defeatist here. I'm in the US Northeast and the sidewalk in my house was installed in 2008. Still basically flawless today. As homeowners, we accept that we need a new roof every 25 years because the consequences are real and tangible to us. I have to think that sidewalks are just part of the cost of living in a walkable community, even if we don't walk that much.

A few communities down, they require sidewalk maintenance for residents if the pavers are uneven at all. It's a very affluent borough, but you'll see people grind down the edges of the sidewalk that stick up in order to meet the code. So you can maintain without replacing.

And besides, we don't have this logic for roads. I mean, SUVs can handle anything, so why bother with all of this even pavement with good drainage?

>Instead, we should be building better accessibility devices, ones that can navigate tough terrain.

You're being downvoted for the first paragraph, but I think your second paragraph is sensible. My running stroller is way better at handling broken sidewalks than the scissor stroller with tiny wheels that fits great in a small trunk and works well at the mall. Strollers aren't super expensive (at least not $30k like that wheelchair) so I can have more than one and use the best one for my situation.

We see concept robots that can handle rough terrain. Wouldn't it be great if that got integrated into wheelchairs somehow?

[jbob2000]

>It's a very affluent borough, but you'll see people grind down the edges of the sidewalk that stick up in order to meet the code. So you can maintain without replacing.

That's kind of why I'm being defeatist. You just need a ton of money to keep sidewalks in good order. And you need the people that live in the area to care enough to report the issues.

>You're being downvoted for the first paragraph, but I think your second paragraph is sensible.

Yeah, I was really trying to setup the second paragraph to be impactful, but I don't think people got that far.

[asfdsaf]

"You just need a ton of money to keep sidewalks in good order. "

No, you don't. You just need to make them properly the first time and keep people from planting trees where they don't belong.

In my parents house in Canuckistan, I've never seen them fix the side-walks in 20 years and they're mostly fine.

[logfromblammo]

Damage to rigid pavements occurs more often in climate zones that experience multiple freeze-thaw cycles at the ground surface during a single winter. Many of the populated places in Canada freeze one or two times at the onset of winter, then stay frozen until the thaw, with maybe one more freeze after that.

Southeast Ontario, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc. will re-freeze near the surface dozens of times every winter, and each time, more pavement damage is possible. Halite and other ice-melting chemicals can exacerbate the problem by making the ice in or under different parts of the pavement freeze at different temperatures.

You don't even need to do it properly the first time. You can seal pavements (and the underlying soil) against moisture infiltration at any time. Dropping a layer of asphalt on top is a common way to do this after the initial construction. Many places in the US simply do not bother, because that would cost a lot more up front, and then there would be fewer maintenance contracts to hand out. There's always the possibility that no one will ever complain, and the problem can be ignored forever--that's money that never needs to be budgeted.

If you build a proper foundation for a sidewalk, and then seal it against moisture, it will stay smooth and level for hundreds of freeze-thaw cycles, barring some natural disaster that would let the water underneath it. But if you're only mayor for two years, and the sidewalks last 30, nobody is going to come back to you 20 years after you leave office and pat you on the back for your wise sidewalk decisions. It is more likely that there will be some crisis right before the election and the money that could have solved it already went into great sidewalks. Or even worse, if you're a subdivision developer, you're out of there a year after the last lot gets sold, long before anyone notices how many corners you cut on the sidewalks.

All of this comes back to the prevailing attitudes in the US about who should be responsible for community infrastructure. We often expect private entities to build it, and public entities to maintain it. This screws up all the incentives. The reality is that subdivision developers probably should not exist. The municipality should be performing that function, instead of annexing every ad-hoc, ex-farmland housing development that springs up on the borders. That's how you get straight streets that connect at both ends, and good sidewalks that go everywhere that cars can. And then you can fire the zoning board, because when you build all the streets, you can control all the lot sizes and business parking requirements directly.

[oneplane]

Not sure why it all has to be paved, using tiles or bricks works fine here.

We do have some problems with ZOAB-based paved roads if the freeze/thaw cycles are too high, but any big problems are repaired in two or three days, and all roads are maintained and replaced relatively quickly anyway, so it's not a big deal.

It's strange to see the broken roads and patchwork in the US. Every time I visit I wonder why there is no majority that agrees on fixing it. Short term "it works now" is such a bad idea...

[logfromblammo]

That definitely would not work in Atlanta. They don't have the freeze-thaw problems there, but using tiles or bricks is a horrible idea, for two reasons: weeds and ants.

When weed seeds fall into a crack and germinate, the roots dig down into the sandy substrate looking for soil. If you prepare the foundation correctly, the weeds die before establishing a viable foothold. So then you have a choice. Pull the weed out, and the crack widens and a little bit more of the substrate is disturbed, or let it stay there and decay, leaving some nutrients. Either way, they next weed seed that lands there will have a much easier time of it. No matter what you do, decaying organic matter will eventually filter down under the sidewalk surface, and something will be able to grow in it. Temperate evergreen pines and magnolias drop leaves all the time--not just in autumn--so you would have to sweep them off daily.

Ants just love making huge excavations one grain of sand at a time. If you build a brick sidewalk, and do not continually spray it with ant-killing insecticides, you will eventually experience a big section of it collapsing into swarming ants, possibly without any obvious prior indications that ants were digging under the sidewalk.

[jbob2000]

> You just need to make them properly the first time and keep people from...

Surely you see the comedy in that statement? I don't think anything happens right the first time. And preventing people from doing anything is pretty tough as well!

[pavel_lishin]

More defeatism.

How is equipping everyone with expensive wheelchairs a better solution than enforcing a standardized construction code?

And how do wheels help someone when they're trying to jog on a sidewalk?

[dwaltrip]

> I don't think anything happens right the first time.

This is irrationally pessimistic.

Nothing is perfect, but there is a huge, meaningful difference between slightly flawed and completely flawed. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be good enough.

Many things _can_ be done decently well the first time. Often times it just takes a small cultural mindset shift, and some minor improvements to the approach.

[CydeWeys]

Did you read the entire article? The main problems the woman are having are with lack of curb cuts, lack of sidewalks, and obstructions in the sidewalk, even on new construction. This has nothing to do with "nature wearing things down" and everything to do with them simply not being built correctly.

Some of the mentioned sidewalks are one hundred years old, and are thoroughly decayed as a result. I bet if every road you had to drive on was in that condition then you'd be upset about it and would demand repairs, rather than just throwing up your hands at the inevitability of entropy. Maybe you want to go live out in primitive conditions in the jungle somewhere, but the rest of us want civilization. Your logic applies equally to roads as it does to sidewalks, so should we just give up on them as well?

[jbob2000]

> Your logic applies equally to roads as it does to sidewalks, so should we just give up on them as well?

No, but I wouldn't drive a low-riding sports car if I lived in an area with crappy roads. I'd buy a pickup truck with good suspension and large knobby tires.

The problem is that accessibility devices don't have the option of "good suspension and large knobby tires".

Every problem that woman experiences is because her wheelchair is not built for the environment she operates in. We need better wheelchairs. Yelling at local state government to fix sidewalks will not work. There are millions of miles of sidewalks to fix and hundreds of thousands of people responsible for them. You can't change that quickly. But you can build a better wheelchair.

[CydeWeys]

> There are millions of miles of sidewalks to fix and hundreds of thousands of people responsible for them.

Again, I don't think you read the article. The sidewalks are in the best condition in cities like Boston, where they are the responsibility of the city. Cities are already responsible for constructing and maintaining roads; is it really so crazy that they do the same for the sidewalks that are built adjacent to roads? In what way does it make sense having hundreds of thousands of individual owners of patches of sidewalk 20 m long? You're throwing away all economies of scale there.

Good sidewalks benefit everyone. I've almost injured myself from tripping over a particularly uneven patch of sidewalk, and many people have actually injured themselves. The elderly and the blind who walk won't benefit from better wheelchairs, but they certainly will benefit from better, flatter sidewalks. Everyone benefits.

[arprocter]

The brick sidewalks in Boston are notoriously uneven - very easy to trip if you aren't paying attention

[volkl48]

Most sidewalks in Boston are normal concrete, not brick. I've only seen the brick in some of the historic sections.

[maxerickson]

The good wheelchair was too expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBOT

[asfdsaf]

And there are hundreds of thousands of un(der)employed decaying middle class men.

Who used to fix sidewalks among other things.

[sulam]

These are new (enough) sidewalks in an area that is highly developed.

[asfdsaf]

I read your comment to see why you were down voted. The first paragraph is fine. Although, as an Italian, I beg to differ. The Romans were quite capable of building roads that are walkable 2000 years later. Not all. But it is 2000 years.

Then I read the second one. Wow. You've internalized the "have bad infrastructure and get an SUV" mentality. We're not paving the world. We're paving a small part of our environment where people live. Yes strollers have stupid wheels. But having good infrastructure in a small area means I don't need a techno-distopian robot walking me everywhere.

[tallblondeguy]

Interesting that we reacted to his comment so differently.

There aren't always perfect solutions to problems. Sometimes futurologists are found waiting for the perfect, inexhaustible source of energy to power the world, but the practical consensus is that our renewable world be a mix of solar, wind, hydro, and some sort of more-advanced atom-splitting. Find multiple angles to chip away at the problem until you get where you want to go.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say "let's try to get all sidewalk cracks under an inch" and then say "let's get wheelchairs that can handle an inch-high crack", as an arbitrary example.

I mean, if we want to talk about unintended benefits - my most mobile stroller was purchased as a running stroller to be used on a rail-to-trail, then I found out it could handle bad sidewalks pretty well. Isn't that the same argument as my top-level post, just from the opposite side?

[klibertp]

> Mother nature does not want sidewalks to exist. A smooth, even surface is not something that exists naturally,

How is that different from roads?

> you can't depend on people to maintain the sidewalks in front of their property

"in front of their property" is one way of looking at this; "alongside a road" is another.

[CydeWeys]

Even more so, why do we expect the state to pay for roads, which are only for drivers, but not to pay for sidewalks, which are for everyone? Sidewalks are just roads for people who aren't driving cars at the moment.

Logically, if the state were going to cover the costs of one of them, it'd be sidewalks, since they can be used by all taxpayers. You could have road users pay tolls to pay for the roads, and people who don't drive could simply opt out.

[noonespecial]

Mother nature also seems to want lots of us to die from smallpox and polio. Sometimes(1) you've just got to tell Mother Nature to take a hike and human it up.

(1) Not always and usually in moderation, but definitely sometimes.

[oneplane]

You can have it, but only if your country is built on the idea of making sure that shared systems (like infrastructure) is maintained and checked, always and forever, and no corners are cut because someone wants to get rich quick.

In our country, our roads, bike roads and sidewalks all have to adhere to the same base set of rules, everywhere. They all have to be there, be maintained and it's not optional. If you have a sidewalk in front of your house and you want to clean/maintain/service it, that's great, but the country will check it, clean it, maintain it. We have sidewalk-streetcleaners about once a month, driving to every sidewalk and if any structural damage or loss of markings is seen, it's noted and fixed during the next maintenance round.

Regarding ramps (as outlined in the article), there is a guarantee that you will always have a clear path between two points, with no hard barriers. So no fences in the wrong place, ramps always facing ramps on the other side of the street, all with the same inclination. No hard edges, everything is rounded off ever so slightly (reduces wear/tripping/hooking dirt), and it's against the law to block any of it.

[lizzard]

What fabulous country is this? I have never experienced the easy sidewalks you describe except in particular parts of some major cities.

[maxerickson]

Properly installed concrete doesn't heave from frost.

Trees are certainly an issue.

[greedo]

Properly installed concrete or properly installed sidewalks? Unless you're pouring footings below the frost line, a slab sidewalk will heave in freezing climates.

[sulam]

"Mother nature" also wants you dead and your component atoms spread across the planet. Are you going to get with the program or keep going for as long as you can?

[jbob2000]

Whew, never thought a comment about wanting better wheelchairs would attract so much vitrol. You want me dead because I posted a thought about sidewalks and wheelchairs on a message board?

[sulam]

I don't want you dead. I don't know you and on general principle would like you to lead a very long life. Mother nature, though, she's after your hide!

[jbob2000]

Haha, touché!

[vacri]

Other things that don't exist in nature: cars, houses, clothes, cooked food...