[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...

[phpisthebest]

So again we go to preferences.

You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...

So how about we ton down the hyperbolic rhetoric.

>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.

I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.

Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.

Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...

>>Everything is pushed further apart for no reason.

it is not for no reason, it just reasons you disagree with.

You desire greater population density, more closely packed cities, and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.

I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...

>So, if where you live is anywhere like Peoria,

Very similar, but more population. The city i live in is about 2x the population, but also about 2x the land area so we have about the same population density.

>> so you have first hand experience of what you're choosing to make your fellow citizens endure

This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.

You believe that because I oppose something in my small neighborhood, of which the sidewalks on my street would have zero impact of the walkablity of my street, means I am some how keeping the poor down...

In reality all of my neighbors, agree with me..

[_dain_]

>You call it barbaric, but I call your "15 min walkable cities" open air prisons...

What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like. I don't understand what you could possibly be talking about.

(Apart from the literal HMP Cardiff of course, but nobody goes there unless found guilty by a jury of twelve)

There's a reason I refer to Streetview so much: I can point to very specific concrete things (often literally made of concrete), instead of getting lost in abstractions and rhetoric (I notice you didn't even address what I said about the shitty bus stops, probably because you know they're indefensible). So show me the bars of my prison, tell me about the shadows on the cave wall.

>I guess that is a chicken vs egg statement. I dont think they actually would, and I believe the "demand" for sidewalks is a very small minority of the taxpaying base. If it was not there would be more puch for it in Local Politics which is far easier to get things like that through.

>Chances are though to it would require a tax bond initiative on the ballot, which I suspect would have a VERY VERY VERY poor chance of succeeding, thus no funding to do it. People often claim they want sidewalks right up until they have to vote to increase their property, sales, or income taxes to pay for them.

This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance. Why do sidewalks require a referendum? And moreover, why don't roads? Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk? There's your answer for why the latter doesn't get built. If you needed a referendum and tax bond initiative to build street lighting, that wouldn't get built much either. Democracy drives in darkness.

And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.

>Also for the record, I find "Strong Towns" to be propaganda not serious research or journalism or what ever...

You can just look at the photographs in the articles, they speak for themselves. You can't just call something "propaganda" because you don't like its point of view.

>You desire greater population density

Greater than what?

>more closely packed cities

More closely packed than what?

I don't want to live in the Kowloon walled city, if that's what you think. I don't like tower blocks (they're usually a false economy). There's a happy middle ground in these things.

>and everything to be walkable so a person a work, live and shop in a small area.

And yeah, what's wrong with being able to work, live, and shop in a small area? You seem to have this fevered delusion that I'm somehow imprisoned in my neighbourhood, that I'm forced to shop locally, but that simply isn't the case. I can do things nearby, and I also can go further afield if I want (which I in fact do), and I have the choice to walk, bike, take a bus, taxi, train, or indeed drive. There are cars going back and forth on the road next to my house right now, they're not impeded in the slightest. The difficulties in getting around that I do have are -- you guessed it -- caused by excessive car infrastructure more than anything else. In the manner of Archimedes: give me a protected bike lane long enough, and I shall circumnavigate the Earth.

On the other hand you can't do things nearby, and you must go far afield, and you must drive to get there. You have objectively fewer options, which makes you less free.

And you must always carry official travel documents, and produce them on demand to armed officers of the state, with severe penalties for refusal. Whereas I go about as I please, breathing free English air, carrying no identification, and never hearing the snarl of "papers, please"; a continental despotism which here thankfully has never taken root. In a country dependent on the car, driving licenses are tantamount to internal passports. How's that for an open-air prison?

>I, and many other Americans, find population density to be a BAD thing, we do not want to live all stacked on each either. I own a 3/4 acre (about 3000 sq meters) of land where my home sits. That is the absolute minimum I would accept, and I am actively looking for a homestead that is 4+ acres (16000 sq meters)...

That's great! I really don't have a problem with you living out in the middle of nowhere with a big house. There's a lot to be said for that way of living.

But I will say this: there's density, and then there's density. One of the good things about low density, I'm sure you'll agree, is that, per person, you have lots of beautiful nature and open places around you, that you can enjoy. But quality is important too, not just quantity. Look at Peoria: there certainly is a lot of area per person, but it's low quality: it's "space", but it's not "place". Most of it is surface parking, or sad little disconnected patches of grass on which no child will ever play a ball game, with no actual nature or biodiversity, or similar ugly and unpleasant non-places that no human being can enjoy. The actual nice public places seem pretty sparse, and have to be shared by a lot of people, as if it were high density anyway. So it seems to be the worst of both worlds: all the downsides of low density (increased distances, worse walkability), but not much upside.

As for private acreage, again: it's possible to have that, without the miles and miles of surface parking. I really have no problem at all with big houses in outlying districts, my problem is with extravagantly wasteful land-use patterns in productive urban cores. That, and unsafe-by-design roads.

>This is a problem with your conceptualization you believe that I am in the minority of my citizens / neighbors, you can not comprehend that people in the US may not want to live like you live in Cardiff.

I get that not everyone wants to live in an extremely dense city (and Cardiff is not such a city). But I don't think most Americans are quite as explicitly hellbent as you about low-density living. I think most people just want a pleasant and affordable place to live, where "pleasant" might amount to many possible things. People can enjoy low density and high density at the same time, without any contradiction; they will weigh the benefits and drawbacks against one another. And I suspect many literally don't even realize what a good walkable city can be, because they haven't lived in one and don't know what they're missing. For example, I've spoken to someone who literally thought I made an enormous measurement error when I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk. He asked me to double check that it really was 10 minutes and really was half a mile and there really were so many in that radius. The idea was foreign, it had never occurred to him that this might be possible and easy and normal, in a place that isn't like Manhattan or something (and I found Manhattan fairly unpleasant when I visited fwiw, it's not the kind of urbanism I like). Low density suburbia was all he knew.

(That's part of why that "Not Just Bikes" channel got so popular -- what it depicts is so mundane, yet so foreign to so many people's experiences. And East Berliners didn't know they liked bananas, until the Wall fell and they tasted them.)

So maybe this "lack of comprehension" runs both ways.

[phpisthebest]

>>What about it is a prison? Go on Streetview for Cardiff or any British city, show me what you regard as prison-like.

nothing today, it is slipply slope that is enables. Which I am sure you reject.. (I am also a pro-gun rights person for many of the same reasons. something i am sure you will also reject.)

I have no trust, faith, or desire for government control. 15min cities enable government control

>>This is just another way of saying your political system is completely broken. What you're describing is not competent governance.

We go back again to you jumping to the conclusion that your method is the correct way, and no other ways are valid. This is the biggest thing I am trying to get through here. People have have different views than you, and that is ok. It is broken, evil, or wrong for us to have a different from of governance,

One where government is limited, extremely so.

>Why don't you need to vote for every little new road that gets built, but you do have to vote for every new sidewalk?

Many locations you would, any project that would require the local city to take on long term debt would need to be voted on by the public assuming that debt. This is why it is a bond initiative. Most Local governments in my area are required by law to have balanced budgets. In my area the city government must submit a Budget to the state at year before, from that local tax rates are set to give the city the money they requested. For a large capital projects that require the city to take out debt (i.e issue bonds) they must go to the tax payers for approval for that.

Outside of that new roads are often created by developers wanting to develop land, the city requires developers to "improve" the roads near the new development as part of approving their zoning and permits, Sidewalks can be included in that requirement which would not need tax payer approval

I find this system to be very functional and the correct way to ensure governments to overspend the public money and go in massive debt like our Federal government has.

>And might I remind you, given the talk of taxes: the federal gasoline tax comes nowhere close to paying for roads, the way it's theoretically supposed to. It's been fixed at the same per-gallon rate for 30 years, hasn't risen with inflation (93% since then), presumably because voters like you don't want it to go up. Road building and maintenance comes out of an increasing share of general funds each year. Non-drivers subsidize you.

That is the federal gas tax, which only pays for federal roads which is like 10% of the paved surface in the US none of which have any sidewalks at all, and all prohibit non-motorized travel of any kind. Seem odd to bring up in a conversation about sidewalks.

Further the federal gas tax is not the only tax that is (or suppose to be) ear marked for Road Maintenance, other taxes and fees include Wheel Taxes, Sales Taxes on Cars, Tolls, Excise Taxes on Vehicles. I can assure all of these taxes have gone up.

Per Gallon gas based taxation is very out dated and not the only revenue source for roads. In the light of the push for EV's needs to be replaced completely

>> I said I could walk to buy groceries because there are so many shops within 10 minute walk

This sounds like you go to multiple places to buy these things, all with in 10misn of each other. People I know that live in walkable cities live a very different life style that is of no interest to me, which includes shopping for "fresh" food daily or multiple times per week, going to small specialize shops (for example a baker, butcher, etc) instead of a supermarket.

I like, and prefer being able to go into one store where I can buy my Milk, Meat, Potatos, a Tent, a new Appliance, a Rug, a new TV, ammo, and anything else I may need for a 2 for 4 week interval where I make that trip no more than once per week.

More recently I like not even having to go into those places, I order online pull out outside in my car they load it up for me and I drive away, shopping for 1-2 weeks of supplies takes 10mins to pickup...