A Boring Dystopia: Vanity Sidewalks Are Everywhere!

In America, sidewalks are used to promote a car-centric culture. This minimal facade of walkability actively discourages pedestrians from walking and car advocates from rethinking urban design to better support non-car-based transportation and living.

Background

I love walking. I also love how such an ordinary mode of transportation is both green, requires no new technology (for an able bodied person), and promotes community by allowing people to see to others also walking.

Most of America does not encourage (and usually actively discourages) walking by design. Our vast country has so much space that efficient land-use is not a priority and will probably not be for centuries because our country’s population density is frankly… puny… outside of some particular neighborhoods and areas of certain large cities (like New York City).

This is the first of a series of articles to comment on certain small, insidious design choices that discourage walkability. I am explicitly choosing to avoid talking about underlying causes (like the housing crisis) and want to touch on smaller urban design choices that reflect our cultures disdain for non car-centric transportation and living. Today, we start with vanity sidewalks.

What is a Vanity Sidewalk?

Very simply, sidewalks are thoroughfare intended to be used by pedestrians and not motorized vehicles. And they have been around for centuries.

(The wikipedia history section on sidewalks refers to Greek cities having sidewalks as far back as 4000 years ago.)

Secondly, I fully subscribe to Jeff Speck’s theory of walkability, another critical concept to define vanity sidewalks. He defines a walkable city as one offering the following four key attributes:

1. A reason to walk
2. A safe walk
3. A comfortable walk
4. An interesting walk

Knowing what a sidewalk is and what walkability means, I define a Vanity Sidewalk as a sidewalk that has been added in front of buildings or to the border of roads for the sake of having a sidewalk but offers few to none of the key attributes required for walkability.

Sidewalks in a typical American suburbs are a ubiquitous example — they are in front of most houses and buildings, but there is almost no foot traffic on them. Because of typical euclidean zoning laws and the large swaths of single family zoned regions in most towns, commercial neighborhoods are often far and isolated from housing.

As an average citizen, if I look at googlemaps and see that it takes longer to walk and is safer to drive when going to the grocery store, I will drive. This trade-off removes most reasons for walking. However, even a purposeless leisure walk is not pleasant. It might be marginally safe because there exists some sidewalk network, but it is sporadically disconnected (broadly removing safety), it often will require crossing extremely wide, car-lane-rich streets which can be mildly unpleasant to downright scary (removing comfort), and sometimes requires crossing over slip-lanes or the default right-turn-on-red rule.

Worse yet, there’s often nothing to look at but cookie cutter corporate buildings, templated houses, and cars (removing interest).

Vanity sidewalks bear the brunt of weather or long term wear and tear, but never are actually used for their alleged intended purpose of allowing people to walk, because though the sidewalks exist, there is no sense of walkability.

A couple weeks ago, I walked to a camping store outside of downtown Redwood City to pick up some camping gear. Leaving downtown felt like I left a sense of humanity because after I left the mildly walkable couple blocks of downtown Redwood City, I arrived at a series of long, dreary sidewalks with a view of cars and dead-eyed drivers waiting for a series of traffic lights to turn and corporate looking buildings and parking lot structures. I was the only person walking. To top this all off, although the camping store had a door facing the sidewalk, it was marked as an emergency exit door only — the real entrance was around the building where the parking lot was and where no sidewalk reached. I crossed a series of inner roads to reach the entrance only to be questioned by the shopkeepers about whether I needed help bringing my purchases to my car. I did not. I was walking.

How do we get better?

Urban planning infrastructure, in my opinion, is a reflection of what we prioritize in our living situations. In order to have functional, well-trodden sidewalks regularly built instead of vanity sidewalks, we need to simply build more dense, mixed use properties in more places. This is in stark contrast to what almost all Bay Area property owners fight for, which is limiting housing to keep property values high and property taxes low.

More dense mixed use properties will encourage housing in commercial areas, allow cities to encourage more pedestrians and non-car traffic, and allow suburbs to bloom into real, live-able communities. People will be encouraged to get out of their bedroom communities and see each other on the street instead of in their cars.

Disclaimer: I am not a city planner nor have I studied urban planning. I am merely an American citizen with strong opinions and a passion for community based urban design.