[acdha]

This is allowed in many areas but it's a bad compromise: in much of the country, there aren't many sidewalks and they're not safe — e.g. you'll have a sidewalk in front of a strip mall but then it just ends on a busy road, driveways are often blocked by cars and are high risk zones with people flooring it as they leave or pulling in without slowing down much, there are random barriers and obstacles between properties, it's not cleared of trash effectively, etc. — and they're often _much_ longer trips. The last time I went to PyCon I was disappointed to see that the path from my hotel to the conference was like 0.7 miles in car and almost 2 on foot because there was a gnarly freeway bridge which forced pedestrians to walk around some unsafe roads.

Maintenance is also a big problem: a sidewalk which is cracked or full of snow / puddles is unpleasant even if it's relatively safe to ride through. One indicator you can use are the number of people riding motorized wheelchairs on the road shoulders — we generally have decent sidewalks here in DC but a lot of the neighboring suburbs added bike lanes during the pandemic and every time that happens you'll notice a ton of people using wheelchairs and strollers there because it's so much better than bumping around over broken concrete and dealing with random poles in the middle of the sidewalk.

The single most important thing which needs to happen is thinking about connectivity: what a lot of places do is make a couple of bike lanes which don't connect places people live/work/shop and then say nobody's using them without recognizing that the miles of unsafe streets on either end are probably the explanation.