One of my pet pieves is sidewalks that don’t connect anything — they just take up space because some county ordinance required some developer to build one. It turns out that sidewalks to nowhere bother other people, too. In fact, there is a website entitled Sidewalks to Nowhere with illustrations from around the country. (That’s where this image, from Fletcher, N.C., came from).
Cortney Langley, a staff writer with the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg, sees the nonsensical nature of disconnected sidewalks as well. “Along Mooretown Road [in James City County],” she writes, “you can take a stroll along a freshly poured sidewalk. For about 200 feet. … Throughout the county there are signs of the seemingly absurd: small patches of disconnected sidewalks that begin or end randomly, often with no connecting path in sight.”
County ordinance requires that new development, even commercial, provide sidewalks out front, no matter where they’re built. The idea is that someday they will link up. Bill Porter, development manager for the county, said that for the most part, it works pretty well. Especially for the county, which gets the sidewalk expense covered by the builder.
Maybe the sidewalks will link up one day. But even if they do, the question remains: Will anyone use them?
To be useful, sidewalks must connect multiple destinations in close geographic proximity. You can use them to walk to your next-door neighbor or to a friend’s house down the street. You can walk two or three blocks to the corner store to pick up some tomato sauce. You can walk to a pocket park, to a restaurant or a neighborhood video store. Sidewalks don’t work in low-density environments that translate a 10-minute walk into a 40-minute trek.
In Henrico County where I live, the problem isn’t so much sidewalks that go nowhere — although there are some that do — it’s sidewalks that are utterly uninviting. More than a few are located just a few feet away from cars whizzing by at 45 miles per hour. Henrico sidewalks are uninviting also because of the vast distances that must be covered. In my observation, the few people who use them are joggers and strollers looking for exercise. Almost no one uses the sidewalks to actually get somewhere. For the most part, sidewalks are a recreational amenity, not a tool to promote mobility and access.
In scattered, low-density areas where houses, offices and stores are rigidly separated, sidewalks are more useless than teats on a boar hog. Building them simply creates a commitment for someone to maintain them. Frankly, I see no point in requiring developers to build the darn things.
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