I grew up in neighborhoods that didn’t have paved streets, let alone sidewalks. 
Singaporean here.
Yeah, I never realised no-sidewalk roads were a thing other than expressways and forested (non-inhabited) areas. I suppose it’s a strange concept for city folk.
I grew up in a neighborhood with sidewalks. I’ve also lived in rural areas without sidewalks. Both are fine. What I don’t like are suburbs with no sidewalks. We’re not talking roads with shoulders but your typical concrete or blacktop streets with cars parallel parked at the curb and streets are just busy enough that you have to dodge between parked cars once or twice per block.
I’m sure people get used to not having them, and it’s probably nice not to have to shovel sidewalks in the winter, but I’m a fan of sidewalks.
Same.
My nearest neighbour was a mile away. I found some planks and lined them up on the ground so I could try to learn parallel parking before my driving test.
Put a few thousand miles on various bicycles I had while growing up.
I learned how one is supposed to walk on a street–against traffic. You also keep a good lookout ahead of you, and step off the road a bit when you see a car coming–though they will also usually try to move around you.
I bet finding out we actually played in the street all the time would blow your mind.
I grew up in a town of 1500 people with no sidewalks. Today there are about 8-10,000 people and still no sidewalks. I don’t understand the problem.
Hendon road is the definition of non-inhabited areas. King’s Ave I’ll give you, but that’s not 99.9% of the population.
As much as I hated West Texas, at least we had sidewalks.
There are quite a few suburbs around Los Angeles with areas of sidewalkless streets, and even in some comparatively urban parts within the city limits of L.A. (especially around the valley) there are areas with sidewalkless streets.
Various factors, I believe, lead to this:[ul]
[li]It was a farm area that quickly turned residential. (Parts of the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys)[/li][li]It’s a well-to-do suburban area where people rarely walk. (Altadena)[/li][li]It’s up against the hills. (Parts of Tarzana, etc.)[/li][li]It’s an unincorporated pocket that didn’t lie in municipal coverage for sidewalks, even though it’s surrounded by development. [/li][li]Any combination of the above.[/li][/ul]
In America, sidewalkes are a midwestern thing. City streets were always laid out and constructed with sidewalks. In the south, though, sidewalks are relatively rare. Most larger cities had sidewalks in older neighborhoods. There were sidewalks on my old street in Huntsville, Alabama, but I don’t recall any in Mobile, except on streets that had storefronts.
But some time around WWII, midwestern cities began to discontinue the practice, and started laying out suburbs with no sidewalks.
I’m 60+ years old, and have (almost) never lived where there were sidewalks. The OP is describing large parts of Texas and a lot of the South. Our neighborhood has no sidewalks at all. On the walkscore website, we’re a “6” for walkability, and “0” for public transit (out of 100, I think).
Answering the question, I (and my kids) played and walked in the street. Rode bicycles as soon as we were able. Go-carts when they were older, and each got a car when they turned 16 (same as me). There is literally no safe way for them to get to school otherwise. The main road to school is busy and has no shoulders or sidewalk.
Many of us grew up this way and sidewalks, buses, etc. are as foreign as flying cars. I had a business trip last year to Austin and used the bus (and some sidewalk travel) to get to my vendor. After being accosted daily by homeless, beggars and the like, it served as a stark reminder of why I never, ever want to live where sidewalks are a main travel route. We don’t have to deal with that out in the exurbs.
Yes, that’s my recollection, too! 
ISTM that there was a period when no-sidewalks was a fashionable style of suburban planning, much like we went through an aluminum-wiring period and other silly cost-cutting fads. Some of my relatives lived in really nice no-sidewalk suburban neighborhoods that were perfectly lovely. Most suburban neighborhoods in my experience have long had – and continue to have – sidewalks on one side of the street.
You seem unable to distinguish between social problems and safe pedestrian thoroughfares. Two entirely different things.
I grew up in a place with no sidewalks (pavements, as they’re called here in England, just to confuse Americans). It was a total pain.
The house wasn’t in a suburb or village or anything, just a row of 4 houses that had previously been workers’ cottages for a big estate which was since broken up into farms. The road in front of the house, however, wasn’t a quiet country lane, it was the local main road. Just a thin verge, not wide enough to walk on, and a tall hedgerow, so poor visibility, plus blind bends, but people still did 60mph down it. It wasn’t safe at all to walk in the road, and I wasn’t allowed to cycle on it either, after my parents allowed my brother to cycle into the village and one of the neighbours nearly ran him over. In fact, I didn’t even really learn to ride a bike, as I didn’t have anywhere to practice aside from a little lawn and a short driveway.
It was fine when I was tiny, we had a big garden, to play in, but it sucked when I got a bit older and should have been getting more freedom. One set of neighbours had kids, but far younger than me (I still went round 'cos we didn’t have a television and they did), and I couldn’t visit my friends or have them round, or get to school without getting a lift, though it was only a mile or so to the village.
This is one part of the issue: pray tell me, my dear English yeoman: What be this hedgerow that thou mention? And why,oh why, did you play in the garden?
Over in the land of the free and the home of the brave, where the buffalo roam, and men are free— there is no such thing as a hedge.
And houses do not have gardens–they have a front yard, with a wide, grassy lawn. (If there is a “garden”, it is a small decorative strip of flowers planted alongside the house, perhaps wide enough for two rows of tulips, or a few rose bushes.)
Yankees keep their front yards open.Unlike the Brits, who pride themselves on their privacy.
There is no concept of a wall between houses that extends towards the street, and many cities have regulations that prohibit building a fence around the front yard.
So kids can go anywhere in the neighborhood without using sidewalks…they just run straight through their neighbors’ lawns in the front yards.
Families with children think this is normal. Older folks aren’t always as pleased.
Leaving footprints in the grass is acceptable, though the kids quickly learn that leaving trails from bicycle tires is frowned on.
Hence the expression we so often hear on these boards from old,crotchety men: “get off my lawn!”
Here in America we have these things called “sweeping generalizations”…
We have homeless people around here. They just walk the streets rather than sidewalks if there are none. The space by the road is still not owned by us, so they can still set up there, too. Or just out on some land that no one goes to.