I'm a big fan of walking. I like it for the health benefits, the freedom to explore, and the simple luxury of being able to walk to things. In fact, it's an important housing prerequisite for me: can I walk to stuff?

But as we often talk about on this blog, the ability to do this depends largely on the prevailing land use patterns, the overall built environment, and, to a great extent, when a neighborhood was built.

It is commonly argued that the "best" neighborhoods were all built before the widespread use of the car, and there's a lot of truth to this. (This makes me wonder if self-driving cars will eventually create a similar "pre and post" divide in our built environment.)

However, not everyone sees it this way. I just read an article about how residents in the suburbs of Minneapolis-St. Paul are vehemently opposed to the construction of sidewalks in areas where there are currently none.

Perhaps I haven't been paying enough attention to the suburban sidewalk wars, but this is the first time I've seen this level of opposition. Some people view sidewalks as a feature, and some people view them as a bug. Clearly, there are residents in the Twin Cities who view them as the latter.

Why? Because they interrupt large front lawns:

“I chose my home with the nice big lawn out front,” Edina resident Melissa Cohen told the mayor and City Council at a Dec. 8 hearing about proposed sidewalks for streets in Prospect Knolls. “We are in a quiet neighborhood. This does not require a sidewalk.”

And for some people, they're unsightly:

In 2007, a Golden Valley resident named Charles Upham told the Star Tribune “sidewalk is a four-letter word. U-G-L-Y.”

You could call it a kind of rural ideology, where sidewalks symbolize the opposite: the city. I suppose there are also practical considerations, like the fact that snow removal on sidewalks often becomes the homeowner's responsibility.

But it appears to me that a large part of this opposition stems from wanting to maintain some semblance of pastoral exclusivity, even if we're talking about higher-density suburbs and the opposition is masquerading as an environmental preservationist movement.

On the flip side, there are practical benefits to sidewalks. They give you a safe place to walk. So, what I wonder is to what extent are the people opposing these sidewalks also anti-walkers? Or is it that the traffic flows in these neighborhoods are so low that people simply feel comfortable walking on the street, like here?

Not surprisingly, there's lots of data to support that people who live in neighborhoods with sidewalks are significantly more likely to walk and be active. If you want people to walk more, build sidewalks. If you want people to ride bikes more, build bicycle lanes. And if you want people to drive more, build roads and highways.

This is how this behavioral stuff works. We're not completely independent actors; we're products of our environment.

Cover photo from The Minnesota Star Tribune

I tweeted the above photo on Saturday morning with the following text: "No sidewalks. Towers in the distance. Welcome to the inner suburbs of Toronto." What I, of course, wanted to highlight is the contrast between the rural-like street with no sidewalks in the foreground, and the high-density towers built on top of Kipling subway station in the background. It is a perfect example of the kind of Toronto we are building, by design, all across the city. And it also exemplifies one of our great philosophical divides.

If you look at the responses on Twitter, you'll see that there are a few opinions. Generally speaking, though, there are probably two main ways to think about this scene. One way is to look at the transit-oriented housing and think of it as urban progress. We are adding new housing and we are doing it in a way that hopefully results in more walkable communities. With this in mind, you might now see the three humans on the street (one of which is in a stroller) and think it's a shame that they have been forced to walk on the road.

The other main way to look at this is that not having sidewalks is actually a feature and not a bug (indeed, a lack of sidewalks can be a pretty good indicator for rich people/wealthy households). From this lens, not having sidewalks means uninterrupted driveways (more parking), less through foot traffic, and a more quaint small-town feel. Also with this lens might be a view that the rural-like street was there first, before the transit-oriented towers. And it was doing just fine before people like me drove through their neighborhood and pointed out the lack of sidewalks.

How do you see this scene?

One of the debates that is happening in cities all around the world right now is about whether or not it makes sense to redistribute public space in order to help with current social distancing measures. We are all being told to stay at home as much as possible, but as we venture out for food and/or sanity walks, many have started noticing that a lot of our sidewalks are in fact too small if you're trying to stay 2m away from other humans. So with vehicular traffic way down, the question becomes: Should we start borrowing some of that space for pedestrians?

Here in Toronto the official position is no. Closing down streets and lanes to car traffic is usually referred to as creating an "open street." And the intent of these open streets is typically to bring people together for public life, which, of course, is the exact opposite of what we're trying to do right now. What this implies, however, is that there's a belief that additional space for pedestrians would induce demand, similar to what is believed to happen when you add additional lanes on a highway.

Lewis Mumford probably had it best when he allegedly said, "Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity." So on the one hand, if you believe that more lanes doesn't solve traffic congestion, you might also be inclined to believe that more and bigger sidewalks isn't going to dampen the anxiety we currently feel when other humans get anywhere near us. The additional space would simply get filled with more bodies.

But maybe you could argue that this is a little bit of a different situation. We're in a global pandemic for God's sake and most of us have the better sense to stay home unless it's absolutely necessary. Perhaps in this case, demand would not increase and the greater supply would simply better serve the demand that is already there. Perhaps. I don't have a strong stance on this, but I'm fairly certain that technology could help with this decision.

What do you think?

Photo by Jason Blackeye on Unsplash