[_dain_]

>False, everyone is not a Pedestrian, I moved into my current home specifically because there are no sidewalks (and no HOA), and I resist any movement to add them to my street.

What the fuck!? Why don't you want a sidewalk? Why would any street even be built without a sidewalk, like how is that even an option. How is anyone meant to walk safely?

>I have a feeling the number of people that want the dream of being able to have a car that just drives itself is FAR FAR FAR FAR higher than the number of people that utilize sidewalks. At least for my Geographic region...

Where are you from, Mars? Cause you may as well be speaking Martian, I can't comprehend your mindset at all.

How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How do kids get to their friends' houses? Even in a low density suburb people do these things.

"The number of people who use sidewalks" is like ... 99%. Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something. Or out in the middle of nowhere.

[UncleEntity]

> How is anyone meant to walk safely?

Only the poors walk and they drag down the property values by their mere presence.

And kids? Nasty little creatures.

[phpisthebest]

>>How does anyone go for a morning run? Walk their dog? How do kids get to their friends' houses?

on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street.

>>Where are you from, Mars?

No the midwest... probably mars to you...

>>Why don't you want a sidewalk?

Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.

>>Everyone uses them at least a little, unless you're literally bedridden or something.

Not bed Ridden, do not use sidewalks.

My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks

[_dain_]

>on the road, there is like zero traffic on my road, and I spend my entire child hood playing in the street.

Same in my childhood, but there were sidewalks (pavements) everywhere. A street without one is simply defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage. Cars go down the middle, pedestrians go on the sides, that's just how it works.

>No the midwest... probably mars to you...

I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

>Because I do not want to maintain them, shovel them, or accept the liability of someone is injured on them.

Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours! It's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense, exactly like the road surface. I've never personally had to maintain any sidewalk outside my house, they're in adequately good repair because it comes out of my taxes. Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something? Like the backyard steel mills in Maoist China? Are you expected to fill potholes in the road too? And why would you have any liability if someone is injured? That's not how torts work, again cause it's not your pavement. You're just making up nonsensical reasons.

>My vehicle goes from my drive to a parking lot, I walk from the inside of my home to the vehicle and then from the vehicle to the inside of a business on the tarmac of the parking lot. No sidewalks

So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination? And you expect everyone else to live this way on your street? Again, how do kids or anyone who doesn't have access to a car at that particular moment manage to do anything?

Your entire world amounts to your house, your car, parking lots, and the inside of shops and offices. That's unimaginably sad to me. I could never live like that. Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air, and never let your eyes see the beauty of the world unimpeded by a plexiglass windshield?

[phpisthebest]

> A street without one is simply defective, like if it didn't have lampposts or adequate drainage.

My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...

>I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

I suspected (and still do) you either live outside the US, or on one of the coasts.

>>Why on earth would it be your responsibility to maintain the sidewalk? It's not yours, it's publicly owned and it's maintained at public expense.

No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.

In some cases the city my pay for the initial creation of the sidewalks, but after that it is on the homeowner to maintain them.

>Does your council expect you to mix your own concrete to patch up cracks, or something?

Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.

Example This is not my city, but my city is simliar... Peoria, IL ARTICLE VII. > DIVISION 1. > Sec. 26-231. - Declaration of disrepair; notice. [1]

>> " . The notice shall advise the owner that he must repair or contract for repairs of the sidewalk in need of repair within 30 days of the date of the mailing of the notice. The notice shall describe with particularity the location of the sidewalk in need of repair."

Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...

In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.

[1] https://library.municode.com/il/peoria/codes/code_of_ordinan...

>So every single little errand you have to do requires getting in a car and driving to a new destination?

Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.

>Do you really never use the two legs God gave you, and never let your lungs breathe natural air,

Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street

[cozzyd]

It's too bad homeowners aren't responsible for maintaining the street in front of their home too.

(but I'm fine with streets with no sidewalks, as long as the speed limit is appropriately reduced to 10 mph or so to make walking safe. Otherwise how are kids to walk to school and back?).

[_dain_]

>My street has lights, drains, everything but sidewalks...

Then it's defective.

>No, not it is not. Not anywhere I have ever lived. They are "easements" that are privately owned, and have to maintained by the home owner, at the home owners expense, and you will be fined if they are not maintained, shoveled, etc.

>Yes?... Or hire a contractor to replace them if they are disrepair.. Often times it is HOA that is responsible as well which comes out of the HOA dues you would pay. Rarely is it the city in area of single family home neighborhoods.

>Now in Peoria, IL they do cover upto 80% of the bill but the owner still has to find, contract, and schedule the contractor, and the city can reject any bill they soley claim is "excessive" in costs and only reimburse what they fill is not excessive, Some / Many cities do not offer any reimbursement at all or offer a lower rate...

>In either case it is still property that is owned by the home owner, the public has the right of access via an easement. Liability in those states and cities is on the homeowner.

That's insane. Stark raving mad. Completely, utterly barmy.

Such a byzantine, litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house. It is obviously broken. It should be reformed so that people's incentives are not aligned against basic standards of civilization, by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance. Imagine if roads worked this way! A patchwork of (ir)responsibility, individualism pursued to a farcical extreme.

>Most people in my city already do... I am the norm.

How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded, or their spouse needed the car for something else, or being drunk at that particular moment, or the car is in for repairs, or they had their license suspended, or any number of other reasons? It would seem one is utterly dependent on an expensive machine, a prisoner in your own home without it, having to pay an enormous ante just for basic participation in society.

>Sure that is what Parks, Camping, Trails, etc are for. Not sidewalks on my street

Those things I listed aren't special treats that you save for a holiday. They're supposed to be a normal everyday part of human existence. Your body needs a baseline level of exertion to maintain cardiovascular health. What you're describing isn't normal at all.

[phpisthebest]

>> you save for a holiday.

UK or EU?

>> their spouse needed the car for something else

Most have a second car.... or even 3... hell for most of my adult life I had both a Car and Truck, I was single. I dont today just a truck but I have thought about getting an EV Car, It would not however replace my Truck but in addition to it.

Uber / Lyft has gone a long way for me not having that 2nd vehicle

>How do people go places and get things done if they can't drive? Like being under 18, or elderly, or poor, or with vision disabilities, or mentally retarded

Bike, Bus, etc.. But I am unclear why you think people under 18, the poor, or the elderly do not also have cars? People can drive here as young as 15, many poor people have cars... hell if you drive through some of the government funded housing / income restricted housing (i.e housing for poor people) some of them have newer cars than I do.

and the elderly drive all the time though I would like them to stop as they drive to f'in slow....

>> litigious system would deter one from wanting a sidewalk next to one's house.

and we have come full circle. see my first post in this subject.

>>by taking sidewalks into proper public ownership (not this "easement" frippery) and allowing for coordination and economies of scale in their maintenance.

I dont know if that is a good case either, the roads in many area;s or pretty shitty, and low traffic residential streets often never get replaced until you can no longer tell if the road as paved or is gravel, and there are soo many pot holes that looks like a photo from a bombing run in war zone.

"Economies of Scale" is not a thing with government project. No Bid Contraction to government preferred contractors aka corruption is ....

Most studies show governments massively over pay for road projects compared to if a private citizen were to simply hire the same company to do the same job. Companies charge the government MORE not less.

[_dain_]

I looked up Peoria, Illinois. 2016 data[1] (the most recent I could find): 15.4% of households have no car at all.

This data[2] gives it by cars per property (not the same as household). Summing across both owner- and renter- occupied, I find 10.7% with no car, 35.8% with one car.

It's a safe assumption that many of those renter-occupied properties are apartments that comprise more than one household. So it's somewhere between 10% and 15% of households that don't have any car at all, and at least 35% with only one car. 1-car households are the plurality. Yet the average car ownership rate is 2, skewed by people who own 3 or more.

So: it's not some tiny eccentric sliver of households with no cars. It's actually a substantial minority. A plurality of couples cannot rely on the second car while one spouse is using the first, because they have only one car.

And in turn, it's an even greater proportion of people (not households) who don't, can't, or shouldn't drive. Children, teenagers, elderly, disabled, and so on.

Those poors with cars, do you really suppose they can afford it? Living paycheque to paycheque with a car loan that's underwater isn't what I'd call "afford". The auto loan delinquency rate in the county is 8% (twice the national average), and 26% among nonwhites: https://apps.urban.org/features/debt-interactive-map/?type=a...

As for buses and bikes: I searched for "peoria illinois bike lanes" and the top results were all about recreational trails. Never a good sign: it means the city government views bicycles as toys, not a means of practical transport. I looked on Streetview for ten minutes and I didn't see any bike lanes anywhere, protected or otherwise. The place seems to be full of 4-, 5-, and 6-lane stroads with 40+mph traffic. There seems to be no infrastructure whatsoever to make that safe to cycle on. I wouldn't dare bike down a road like this[3], to take a random example. And that's not even the worst one I found.

My intuition that the roads are unsafe is correct: in 2019 (the most recent non-corona year on the city-data page), the city of Peoria reported 7 traffic-related fatalities, out of a population of 113,150. In that same year, there were only 3 such fatalities in Cardiff (where I live), a city with a population of 480,000. Peoria's roads are 10x as dangerous by that metric. The story for non-fatal injuries is similar.

And here's blogpost[4] quoting local cyclists (what a hardy breed they must be!):

>Roads on these maps have been suggested by local cyclists as being safe to ride on – most of the time. Caution should still be taken at busier times of the day when people are driving to and from work.

Lmao. So if you actually want to like, get to work safely ... you can't do it on a bike. That's what you're expecting people to do?

No bus lanes anywhere on Streetview that I can see either, so that puts a hard ceiling on how much the city cares about public transport, and therefore how viable it is to rely on. EDIT: actually, to hell with bus lanes, where are the bus stops? I saw places with bus stop icons on Google maps, but the Streetview shows nothing at first glance. Like here for example https://goo.gl/maps/2UmQU9SumppeBmTt9 the overhead map shows two bus stops. I searched for several minutes on Streetview for the physical objects corresponding to these bus stops -- eventually I found them. They're just little metal signs attached to lamp posts that say "bus stop" on them. You call that a bus stop? Where's the shelter from sun and rain, where's the place to sit, where's the map of the routes and timetables? It's the same story even in the busier parts, like this place dares to call itself a "Main Street" https://goo.gl/maps/ovFbS37DLVCsN9t4A it's right next to a University, yet its "bus stop" is a perfunctory little disk of metal stuck on a light pole. How does anyone think this is remotely adequate?

Enormous indoor parking facility right next to it though. They didn't skimp on that ...

Actually now that I think about it, "Peoria", sounds familiar. Oh yeah, I coincidentally read about it the other day. An article about how atrocious the built environment is for non-drivers[5], and the indignities they suffer. Read that article. It's absolutely fascinating.

>On their walk, the group observed a corner of the city by East Peoria, from a downtown shopping area to a nearby neighborhood. They discovered there were no sidewalks for a significant length of the stretch, but there was a wide road, and clear, muddy pathways filled with shoe prints and bike marks showed that despite the area not being designed for people on foot, people were using it.

>“Everybody acknowledged [the neighborhood] had a pretty wide road. And very little vehicle traffic went by us during the time that we walked through there,” said Fenton.

>In one of the spaces where there was a dedicated walking area with a sidewalk, it felt uncomfortable and out of place—like people didn’t belong there.

>“We came through this area, which is bizarre, there's a sidewalk with chain link fences,” said Fenton. “People literally said ‘are we supposed to be going here?’ And the reason that that was interesting was because when we came out the backside we could see footprints and mountain bike tracks. Clearly, people from that neighborhood use this as a shortcut to cut back over to the retail area.”

It's fucking barbaric to make people live this way. You can't even get from one side of the river to the other on foot:

>After some research, Lees learned that, between 271 miles of river, there were only two bridges with a protected walking path—and they were nearly 267 miles apart, closest to the large metropolitan cities Chicago and St. Louis. It was obvious to Lees that there was an unequal opportunity for locals to travel safely about the city.

Clearly there's latent demand for sidewalks, that is going unmet. Far more people would walk if the city cared about making it safer and more pleasant.

Meanwhile, staggeringly large amounts of land in Peoria is apparently wasted on empty parking spaces[6]. Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.

>In fact, Peoria is so full of parking that the amount of land devoted to surface parking in the county actually surpasses the amount of land devoted to buildings

Just amazing. No wonder people own so many vehicles, they're pretty much forced to, just to do ordinary things. The infrastructure is biased comprehensively towards motor cars, rendering anything else impractical and/or unsafe.

So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria, then you're pretty much like Marie Antoinette saying "let them eat cake". There are no safe, reliable viable alternatives to the car, by design, and you're trying to keep it that way on purpose, out of sheer selfishness. Maybe you should try living car-free for even a single week, so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure. Do it, if you think it's so trivial. And then maybe after that week (if you survive) you'll gain some empathy and realize why they want sidewalks.

[1] https://www.governing.com/archive/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

[2] https://www.city-data.com/county/Peoria_County-IL.html

[3] https://goo.gl/maps/qiK3QZ4WNKgFj4Cm6

[4] https://ivwheelmn.org/wordpress/?page_id=372

[5] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/6/peoria-reformin...

[6] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/16/parking-peoria...