Gotcha, thanks.
This really seems like step one - if the neighborhood doesn’t want, you don’t even need to fight city hall. You particularly need to get the folks with no strong opinion one way or the other - whoever started the ball rolling will be after to say yes, so you need to present your case to them also.
For me, the pro-sidewalk case would be stronger, so bring cookies with you when you chat them up. Or scotch - you know your neighborhood better than I do.
Dichotomy
Municipalities want to encourage people to walk and ride bicycles to decrease congestion (and be environmentally friendly) but don’t want to provide space for them to do so. So if you want to walk, in the gutter or the mud for you. Riding a bike is more hazardous because there are unpaved shoulders and narrow roads so cars and trucks can’t give you more room. There are bike lanes, but a bike lane in a .2 mile stretch of a busy road (truck route) with no connections to any other bike lane is a criminal waste.
Mr. CK walks to work most days (see thread about living paycheck to paycheck) and has to walk on a very busy street with sidewalks on about half the length of his walk. I shudder to think what it will be like for him as the snow increases this month.
Totally a suburban thing locally. The site you linked to seems to cover parking in New Orleans’ downtown areas (the CBD, French Quarter, etc.) where parking is metered and otherwise strictly controlled.
Wide swaths of New Orleans’ residential areas are essentially laid out just like suburbs (almost no dense, stereotypically inner-city residential areas here). Parking in those ‘suburban-looking’ areas – though within the city limits – is not much regulated so long as nobody’s driveway is blocked. But there are no meter maids or beat policemen in those city residential areas looking out for illegal parking – if someone IS blocking your driveway, you have to call the police and wait for a patrol car to arrive.
FWIW … locally, there are no neighborhoods without sidewalks. In the city, in the suburbs, anywhere.
I wasn’t clear enough on the distinction I was trying to make- there’s a difference between rarely or never getting a ticket for doing something and that “something” actually being legal. There are no traffic agents routinely walking through my neighborhood in Queens ( which BTW, consists of single family houses) looking for cars blocking the sidewalk- but if my neighbor calls to complain I’m blocking the sidewalk and he can’t get down the block, I will get a ticket if I’m still blocking the sidewalk when the traffic agent/patrol car gets there. It is treated exactly the same as a car blocking my driveway. It appears according to this https://www.nola.gov/dpw/parking/parking-101/?searched=parking that parking on the sidewalk is illegal in all of New Orleans.
I haven’t spoken to all 26 households yet, but the few I have spoken with seem to be mostly anti-sidewalk. It looks like this:
Anti-sidewalk: older, native to area, fixed income or retired, no children, nice landscaping/yard
Pro-sidewalk: younger, recently moved to neighborhood, children, less emphasis on landscaping/yard
I can basically tell in advance before I speak with someone if they want a sidewalk. I don’t even need to take cookies.
Will the sidewalk really be 6 feet wide? That’s crazy, what are they usually, like 2 feet wide?
My town has been trying to replace the sidewalks by the high school, on a town road. BUT they have to have the designs, etc approved by the state, which seems to be very picky. And every single little part of it has to be federally handicapped accessible. So I’m sure you could find something or somebody to really slow things down.
And my town does clear the sidewalks. But not the ones at my house, I guess because we live a mile outside of the center of town. But we still pay the same taxes, so I never shovel anything but my driveway.
My wife and I thought the same thing. We went over a couple blocks to take a look at the sidewalk on a cross-street that has four lanes and a middle turn lane. The sidewalk is 4’ wide there.
But our notice says the new sidewalk will be 3-1/2’ from the edge of the road and 6’ wide.
And I know for a fact that no sidewalks anywhere near me get cleared by the city. Fortunately, it only snows a few times a year here, and it’s usually just a couple inches.
I think you should make a list and be methodical.
Are the ones who are pro-sidewalk strongly pro-sidewalk? I hadn’t thought about it much, but I like sidewalks, so if my neighborhood didn’t have them and a vote came up, I’d probably vote for them. But it’s not that important an issue to me, so if a nice neighbor who I liked pointed out some reasons why they were not in favor and asked me to consider it, I could see changing my mind.
On the other hand, if they are strongly pro-sidewalk, then you probably want to talk to them as little as possible. Put on an air of being just curious what people think, not of trying to convince people. Because if they realize you’re trying to convince people to vote against it, they’re going to be more likely to pound the pavement trying to whip up some votes for it.
Wow, a 6’ wide sidewalk? That’s like another street.
We don’t have sidewalks in my subdivision. We did in our first house, and I was responsible for clearing off the snow. There are sidewalks along the major roads where I live now, but the city plows them. Not very promptly. When I walk the dog, I sometimes have to be careful of the ice, and tell Leet the Wonder Dog[sup]TM[/sup] “No pulling on the leash or Grampa will fall and break a hip and then we can’t go for Nice Walks” and he seems much affected.
I wouldn’t want sidewalks in front of my house, although I would do a better job of clearing them, and I don’t park in the driveway.
Regards,
Shodan
If you cant’t fight the sidewalk, maybe push for a more reasonable alternative. Our sidewalk is right up against the street so no setback. Also, 6 feet seems excessive for a sidewalk. Have them narrow it.
In many areas city lots actually cover all the way to the middle of the street, meaning the actual street itself is on part of your property, with the neighbor on the other side owning a lot that meets it. Sidewalks and streets are public-use easements through privately owner property in many cases, and government has the authority to make use of them for these purposes. This isn’t a universal situation and will vary from place to place, in a lot of older cities lots were laid down before public streets were even regularly maintained all over the cities (what I mean would be, major thoroughfares were publicly maintained, but the side streets were often just worn paths that locals had in formally stamped out via natural means when traveling around.)
This sounds like a really weird proposed “sidewalk to nowhere” if it doesn’t really connect anywhere to anywhere and is just a random sidewalk to be built along a few blocks of a suburb. That to me drastically reduces the “pros” of the sidewalk. My advice is if you’re working to get this voted down, and you find people in favor of it–be very non-confrontational. This is ultra-retail politics, not a time to get angry or emotional. The tactic to use would be to talk about it casually for awhile, suss out their opinions. If they are diehard sidewalk advocates, probably just politely move on. Don’t come off as an angry old man. If it sounds like they aren’t well informed, then politely tell them something like “I enjoy sidewalks too in the right context, but what concerns me is these sidewalks are slated to be two feet wider than other sidewalks in the area, and our neighborhood has little foot traffic to justify that, not to mention the sidewalk isn’t going to really facilitate meaningful transit since it’s basically unconnected to anything…I just wouldn’t want to lose so much of my yard and have to pay higher property taxes for something like this.”
Typically you actually own the land the sidewalk is on and about half the street in front of your house, the sidewalk and street being right of way easements. What you probably learned about in your real estate class was the concept of fee-simple land ownership versus allodial land ownership.
Allodial ownership is a very old concept that basically means you have true, absolute right of land holding that is not encumbered by anyone. How this might actually work, to give two examples–in very ancient times there was significant land that was outside the claims of any King/Chief/potentate. If you could establish and defend a freehold in such land, well–it was yours. You held allodial title to it, there was no legal jurisdiction above your ownership of the land. (There was also no legal protection, either–so someone with some friends and some weapons could come take your freehold and the only recourse would be whatever you could provide with physical self defense.)
In post-Roman pre-Middle Age era Europe, significant portions of the Western world were held by basically quasi-tribal peoples. While under Roman control that had accepted some parts of Roman law, but often tribal laws and customs continued as well, as the Empire’s control loosened and the tribal Europeans gained de facto as various organs of authority of Rome disappeared, the tribes often came to be under some sort of leader that might be crowned as King or hold some similar title. Members of the tribe had to fight for the King and owed him certain allegiances and duties, but concepts of individual land ownership (which had existed among Romans) weren’t really integrated into the European tribal peoples way of life. However, having been part of the Roman Empire they weren’t ignorant of the concept either. Lots of people in these tribes for example enjoyed their own homes and small farming plots, but they enjoyed these areas as part of the tribe (i.e. there was tribal ownership over it, with no formal recognition of an individual family’s right to the land.) As the tribal peoples of Europe started to adopt “more modern” systems of law and government, land that was previously viewed as community property started to be formally granted to specific freeholders.
These freeholders owned an “allod”, and had allodial title. This pre-dated the development of Feudalism. Ownership of an allod, in fact often positioned a given family very well as history churned on, allodial land owners often times became the nobility as feudalism developed. They would give fiefs made up of parts of their lands to their vassals–the vassals did not receive allodial title, which state with the owner of the allod, but gained use of the land conditional on their performance of duties as a vassal and payment of men/crops/monies as required to the seigneur. This process was happening all over Europe in modern day Germany, France, England etc.
As Kingdoms began to form, Kings generally were persons who controlled vast amounts of allodial lands, which gave them power because they could grant fiefs to many vassals. Vassals represented the power to call on subordinate men to provide levies and money. Kings however also would end up with significant amounts of allodial land owners under their authority, a King would prefer that no one hold allodial title other than himself, but in practicality this wasn’t always possible. As allodial free holds would become part of a Kingdom, their owners had special privileges over typical vassals–namely they couldn’t be taxed on their lands, and didn’t typically owe the King special duties.
These early Kings of course lived in a time with less formal legal systems than today, so while they would gain overlordship over persons who held allodial land rights from times long ago, they might not legally be able to assess taxes for example, but they could basically muscle their way into getting oaths of obedience which would require an allodial landowner to say, fight in the King’s army if necessary. They could also be taxed–just without the King having the ability to seize their land if they didn’t pay the tax. But they could do other things to get the tax (like punish the person on which the tax was levied, even if they couldn’t legally encumber the property.)
Allodial land ownership in the time of early Kings was well established with lots of laws and customs around it, and Kings had to respect this to some degree. As time progressed monarchs and countries developed laws that made allodial titles much more common in function to fiefs or other types of monarchically-overseen land titles, and eventually did away with allodial ownership entirely in most cases (although in several continental European countries, the term “allodial title” is actually still used, it doesn’t have its original meaning in any meaningful sense.) One of the things William did after he conquered England was to establish that the King held all land in England in allodial title, this then meant that no more allods existed in all of England, and that no land in England existed (or exists even to this day) that is not owned by the King. Similar things happened over time in most of Europe (with a few countries as I said, still retaining the allodial term but not the original meaning); by the 18th century or so in most countries the only significant allodial land owner was the Catholic Church, as a number of Catholic countries still allowed churches, monasteries and etc to hold allodial ownership (which is why, for example, the Church wasn’t taxed in pre-Revolutionary France.)
So in a very hard “legal sense” the only true “ownership” of land is if you hold classic allodial title, which virtually no private person living today holds in any sense unless they are a monarch (and even then they hold it via virtue of their crown.) In common law countries the highest form of private land ownership is “fee simple” estate ownership. A fee simple estate is a legal conception, that basically grants you an estate that is defined as a legal entity controlling most uses of land in a designated area (while at a high level the land is held allodial by the sovereign–States and their subordinate units and the Federal government in America, crowns in constitutional monarchies etc), “fee simple” means that you basically have right to use and control the land limited to only a few government powers: taxation, eminent domain, police power, and escheat (the right of government to take the estate upon your death if you have no living heirs.)
Other forms of land ownership are “fee simple conditional”, which is when legal deed to an estate is encumbered by additional legal restrictions. An example would be if I owned a bunch of land near a university, and upon my death I granted it to the university on the condition that it be used to build academic buildings or dormitories, things of that nature. The stipulation being if the university does not use it for that purpose, it instead goes to say, the local municipality with stipulation it be used for a public park.
Below that would be forms of ownership like condominium, which is often described as legally your right to reside in a “box of air”, with various physical structures and common areas of the association being owned as undivided community interests (and condos can be a series of free standing dwellings, town houses, etc–the stereotypical multi-family condo building isn’t the only physical form of condominium.)
Then below that is leasing which is an explicitly temporary right of use.
Emphasis mine. Which is precisely why I asked the question.
What may or may not happen in some cities is all very interesting, but the only thing that really matters in this case is what the situation is in the OP’s city, and he still hasn’t really clarified the situation.
Have you discovered why those who have requested sidewalks have done so? Could there be a valid reason you’re not aware of, one that might explain why the city approved it?