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It’s time for Americans to embrace small cars
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Never gonna happen. Where I live, it's not safe for my daughter to walk the 1/2 mile to school. To make it safe, we would need to install sidewalks throughout town. That's millions of dollars that less than 100 ~~children~~ non-taxpayers would use. And since the school is in the middle of a residential neighborhood, there's not really any other use of the sidewalks either...
As a European, this statement sounds completely insane. I honestly can not comprehend how a nation got to the point of saying "we don't need to be able to walk somewhere from our house so lets not bother building sidewalks".
You and your daughter should cycle to school though. If she's not old enough to go on her own bike, take her with a trailer bike. If she's too young for that then a child seat, and when she's old enough she can cycle on her own.
The idea of using a car to go 900m is just crazy to us.
It's crazy to us too! Unfortunately, we don't have much say in the matter. That said, plenty of kids do still walk to school, and many do have sidewalks, although they're far from universal. The thing is that without the sidewalks you can more easily achieve:
The last time they installed sidewalks, they were installed between a Target that you can't get to unless you drive, and a commercial area that's about a mile away. I'm not sure what the percentage of people who are going to walk from work to target on their lunch break is, but that's what they did.
The other sidewalk that they tried to put in, was in front of the township building. Which is between to a horse farm and a forest. I get the "if you build it they will come" mentality, but I don't think it applies for trees and horses.
First of all, either walking near the school is unsafe or the school in the middle of a residential neighborhood. You don't get to have it both ways!
Second, the idea that sidewalks are too expensive is obviously horseshit, considering that the alternative is widening the roads and they can somehow always find the much larger amount of money for that.