I’ve lived all but two years of my life in areas without sidewalks.
I don’t get the OP at all.
You walk/bike/play in the street.
The first is in my experience but not the latter. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood in Phoenix that was built in the early fifties. It was in a former citrus orchard – even after thinning we had a dozen grapefruit trees on the property – but there were no sidewalks. There were raised curbs, rounded ones you could drive over at any point, so rainwater draining in the streets didn’t get in the yard and irrigation water in the yard didn’t get in the street. The traffic was light so we kids walked and biked everywhere we wanted to go.
Then the [del]hordes[/del] nice people from the Midwest started arriving in droves and began whining about how it wasn’t a real neighborhood without sidewalks so the developers started putting them in. When the quarter-section at the end of our block was developed into a residential neighborhood in 1962 it got sidewalks. Thing is, I never, ever saw them being used. A concrete sidewalk in the summer when it is 110 outside is very unpleasant but even in the winter there would not be throngs of people surging to and fro like we were in Chicago or something.
The other thing they whinged about was how there weren’t any plants like “back home.” Well, it’s a desert, dummies but would they listen? Exotic (to the locale) plants were brought in and planted everywhere. This area used to be a haven for asthmatics and hay fever sufferers. Now, thanks to the mild winters, there’s something blooming and shedding its fuckin’ pollen just about every month of the year and I am popping antihistamines like Tic Tacs. Damned outlanders.
I never lived near sidewalks until I was an adult. We rode bikes on the road and played in the woods (but sometimes also the street).
The biggest downside for me as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s was that I couldn’t skateboard. All the cool kids at school and on TV skateboarded. I got a skateboard for my birthday one year. But lumpy back road tarmac is no good for skating. So my skateboard sat around outside, barely used (I sometimes tried to teach myself to ollie on our short concrete walkway between the driveway and front porch, but I never succeeded), until one day I left it in the driveway and it got ran over.
a) The early years of my youth ------ it was called a “farm”. Lack of sidewalks was no issue; distance was sometimes since it was basically 9 miles for 6 houses. We managed.
b) Later years of my youth ----- suburbia. Not only did we walk in the streets, we actually played in the streets with games being sometimes paused by the shouting of the word “car”. Nobody ever got run down or anything bad. But this was the 60s/early 70s and nothing bad even happened then except in California.
Yeah, I don’t get the OP either. People are different, and neighborhoods are different.
Except for a brief period in my 20s when I lived in real city-type area, I have never had sidewalks, and never missed them. To me they detract from the appearance. When house-shopping a few years ago, no sidewalks was one of the things I considered a plus(my SO is neutral on the issue). Another thing I don’t like is street lights, which many people think are a good thing to have, but I prefer to see the stars at night. We have some street lights now, but thankfully not many - and none near my house. But we don’t have any stop signs.
It makes sense to have sidewalks in areas where there is a lot of traffic and cars are routinely parked on the road, but that’s not anywhere that I would want to live.
We don’t have sidewalks. It’s a little island of unincorporated land so we lack sidewalks or municipal water/sewers (have a public well and homeowner septic). As noted, you just walk along the edge of the road.
There’s no curbs or storm sewers. The road is graded so water runs off into people’s yards and from there into drainage swales and then presumably down to a storm sewer at the major roads (which do have curbs, etc). Walking along the road is no big issue since it’s residential and doesn’t have much road traffic.
The house where I grew up had was bordered by a creek and a rather large wooded hillside. The shortest way to just about anywhere was to jump over the creek and climb the hill, weaving through the woods via paths all the other children in the neighborhood had blazed.
I never realized how deprived I was.
Motorcycles!
Manhattan, obviously. Probably the upper east side.
When I bought my house about 14 years ago, we didn’t even have curbs. Where I live is all post-WWII little houses in a second ring suburb of Minneapolis, so not the country or anything.
As many have posted, you walked in the streets or alongside in yards.
Eight years ago they finally re-did the streets, added curbs, and a sidewalk. Across the street.
People still walk in the street or alongside in yards.
My inner suburban neighborhood has sidewalks on some streets, but not all of them. There are many, many families with young kids, so the streets are full of people walking dogs/pushing strollers, kids playing ball or otherwise running around, and commuters walking to/from the bus or train. I’d guess that fewer than half the houses have off-street parking, so most of the streets are lined with parked cars. It would be nice to have sidewalks, but it’s not really a big deal. It is kind of odd that my son’s parting words are often, “I’m going to go play in the intersection!”
I STILL live in a neighborhood where there are often no sidewalks. When walking my dog I can’t go a block in any direction without encountering a sidewalk-less stretch. So, walk in the street, walk on the shoulder, walk across the edge of someone’s lawn.
I will say, there are neighborhoods in the city where people are taking the sidewalks out, and I think that’s a mistake. The unspoken but legal solution is that there is a right-of-way to walk on the edge of the yard because you don’t have to walk in the street–but the people who are taking out the sidewalks are replacing them with things that cannot be walked on. Flower beds, rock pits. And down goes the neighborhood’s walkability score–which I think is what they want.
And just to come at this from another angle, in Haiti - the very definition of a third world country - Port Au Prince has sidewalks. Guess they don’t have any problems…
I didn’t grow up in a neighbourhood that had no sidewalks.
We played football in the street. Periodically, someone would yell out “CAR!” and the game paused.
Scoring while the game was off was frowned upon, Keith.
We dreamed of having sidewalks. All we had were narrow boards covered with razor blades and broken glass, and we were thankful to have them.
You’re not even allowed to ride your bike on the sidewalk where there is one, so what would be the point?
Even the nicest suburban neighborhoods around here generally don’t have sidewalks. The only ones that do are usually closer to downtown. I live in your average surburban neighborhood, and we just played in the street. There’s no real need for them.
Man…you guys had actual narrow boards, razor blades AND broken glass? We dreamed of such things…
Ha, in Left Coast Portland there are whole neighborhoods within city limits that are completely unimproved aside from whatever fill dirt the neighbors chuck into the potholes and lakes. There’s a guy on the Portland subreddit who’s done a whole series of Urban Offroading vids:
For the record, I too live on a dirt street in outer SE Portland. Sidewalks? HA!
I grew up in this town when the population was app 3000 and apart from the main street, not only were there no sidewalks, the roads were not paved either.
Fifty years later the population is around 14000, the roads are now paved, but most of the town remains sidewalk-less.