it is because people are stoopit.

Good thing you have copious smooth paved sidewalks. I'm continually amazed that even here in self-consciously progressive, allegedly bike- and ped-friendly Austin, some of the most-walked parts of town have no sidewalks.

I'm not talking about the pretty tree-lined streets of older Austin neighborhoods, where installing sidewalks would disrupt the landscape and where for the most part there's so little traffic that walking in the street is safe and pleasant. No, I mean the parts of town where the "underclass" lives in sufficient numbers that a lot of people walk by necessity. For instance, I take my car to be serviced at a dealership on a freeway access road and sometimes walk to a major bus transfer center half a mile away. The area was developed in the seventies when it was considered "suburban". It has numerous apartment complexes and small rented houses where many working poor live and every bus disgorges numerous pedestrians. Yet many of the businesses along the access road have no sidewalks, just dirt paths worn into their landscaping.

As far as the 'burbs proper go, another factor is the trend toward gated or at least limited-access neighborhoods, where a chunk of land up to several square miles in size will have a single route in or out. The pattern repeats itself in miniature (I'm tempted to say fractally) in that many streets within a development branch out in tree formation, with no grids, loops or lattices. Thus to get from point A to point B on foot or by bike, there is often a single available route which traverses the tree with no possibility of short cuts. Nor can you optimize your route to avoid unnecessary ups and downs in Austin's hilly terrain (a big factor for bicyclists in less than Ironman condition). And if point B is outside the neighborhood, you're likely to be dumped at the neighborhood entrance onto a narrow, hilly county road with speeding traffic and little shoulder, let alone sidewalks.

The motivation for this anti-pedestrian, anti-bicyclist design is ostensibly "security": people feel less vulnerable to crime living in the middle of a maze of uniform middle- or upper-class housing with no quick escape routes for bad guys. Yet which is actually safer, a neighborhood where no one walks or a neighborhood with lots of eyes out on the street at pedestrian speeds? I'd say the latter wins hands down.

Once in a while I'll see an older neighborhood with a feature that provides the perfect compromise: a pedestrian bridge across a creek or an informal path across railroad tracks or some other obstacle, effectively linking two branches of the tree. In my opinion this "pedestrian connectivity" should be part of the city code: pedestrian and bike paths which cut across developments and provide shorter routes for human-powered traffic than motorized traffic. In newer developments planned with this idea from the outset there could be entire miles-long commuter routes for walkers and bicyclists consisting mostly of a series of cul-de-sacs connected by easements between the houses at the dead ends. Unlike present hike-and-bike trails which generally follow greenbelts (great for recreation but rarely efficient for commuting), the bike/ped routes should terminate at schools, retail centers, office complexes and public transportation hubs.

A street like that, with no through motor traffic but lots of friendly walkers and bicyclists, ought to be prized real estate since it would come closer to providing the small-town ideal that suburban developers all pitch in their marketing.

Sorry for the rant. You punched one of my buttons. I guess I should blog this myself.