Each house has a driveway long enough to park in. Remove the pointless front lawn and driveway, switch to on-street parking, narrow the absurdly wide road a bit, and BAM, you got enough space for sidewalks, bike lanes, and trees. There is PLENTY of space on this street for everyone.
Well sure, if you were designing from scratch, but with existing neighborhoods, the city may not have the necessary right-of-way rights to do that, so what they’ve done here may be the only option, even if it could be executed better.
My point is that working to make cars less necessary is a process and if the only way a city can add a “sidewalk” is by carving it out of the existing road, then so be it. After all, by making some of the road devoted to pedestrians only, we are effectively reclaiming space back from cars, right? Isn’t that a good thing?
Each house has a driveway long enough to park in. Remove the pointless front lawn and driveway, switch to on-street parking, narrow the absurdly wide road a bit, and BAM, you got enough space for sidewalks, bike lanes, and trees. There is PLENTY of space on this street for everyone.
Well sure, if you were designing from scratch, but with existing neighborhoods, the city may not have the necessary right-of-way rights to do that, so what they’ve done here may be the only option, even if it could be executed better.
My point is that working to make cars less necessary is a process and if the only way a city can add a “sidewalk” is by carving it out of the existing road, then so be it. After all, by making some of the road devoted to pedestrians only, we are effectively reclaiming space back from cars, right? Isn’t that a good thing?
They could have used the same space and created a proper (if narrow) sidewalk with it, instead of this death trap.