But, you still called the police and tracked down the mayor for an unshoveled sidewalk? The is the most suburban insanity ever, lol.
What would you do if a road you drove on daily was blocked and nobody was doing anything about it? Finding out how one goes about getting a sidewalk cleared is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The folks in the DOT Of the county I work in most often get most of their cranky sidewalk calls from mobility impaired people who live in urbanized areas and don't have cars.
Knock on their door, shovel it myself, walk in the couple of inches if snow, do nothing while bitching about It, etc. It would never fucking occur to me to call the police and would be hung up on if I called.
I get the annoyance and the ADA compliance issue, etc but I can't think of one place I lived that the police would even take me seriously or that I could even track down the mayor. That is insanity to me but I know there a millions place where this does/can occur. It was very tongue-in-cheek
But, you still called the police and tracked down the mayor for an unshoveled sidewalk? The is the most suburban insanity ever, lol.
Why, because you say so? It's a hazard, and again discriminatory to those that are differently-abled. These are exactly the issues that the mayor should get involved with. The police often act as code enforcement in towns, and she did not realize that it wasn't in the code.
Look, I'm all for ADA access. One of my friends is a complicated medical patient and documents a lot of the violations she finds on Facebook. It's ridiculous what she goes through, especially living in a major city. If it is walkable, it should be accessible. Period.
However, the difference between a city neighborhood and my mom's semi-rural subdivision is night and day as regards traffic. The street is wide, traffic is extremely light (1-2 cars per hour, maybe), and no one is parking on the street, so visibility is high. The neighborhood is not walkable to anywhere, except around the block for exercise on a nice evening. There are no through streets, and the only people who enter/exit the neighborhood live there (they don't even get pizza delivery). A wheelchair user or walker user (like my dad, back when he was alive) can just stay in the street without concern for their safety if they're out taking a walk. Moving to the grass is only precautionary and I've never felt unsafe choosing either option.
There really isn't a difference, especially when it comes to ADA laws, but ok.
Can you point me to the law? I'm only able to find regulations on the build/design requirements (which I am already familiar with). I see guidelines stating they should be in urban areas, non-interstate highway right-of-ways, commercial areas, and between commercial transportation stops. For the record, I do not disagree with you, I'm just trying to educate myself on the requirements so that I can speak intelligently instead of with anecdotal evidence.
No sidewalks is a marker for affluent for some folks. I personally want to live in a walk-able neighborhood which means sidewalks but also retail/restaurants/services like libraries in walking distance.
This. There’s a neighborhood just of rock creek in upper NW called Hawthorn, and they are fighting about not having sidewalks. It’s the only place I saw McCain and Trump signs, fwiw. It translates to “don’t let non-white people walk around our hood.”
Post by ohiopollworker on Mar 13, 2018 12:11:46 GMT -5
Our city has sidewalks on main roads, and the city shovels them. Side roads with basically no through traffic have none.
I like the system. People are shitty and don't shovel, or have physical issues and can't.cities nearby fine them $$$$. Good for keeping walks clear for the disabled but financially devastating for poor families who can't shovel.
With no sidewalks, the street is well plowed so it is safe and easy to walk or bike on. And since it's consistent in the whole town people are used to looking for kids. But it is all 25 mph streets with frequent stop signs,so not the same as a major thoroughfare.
I love that the city just takes care of clearing snow on busy sidewalks. Some cities near us are going to more city sidewalk clearing. It's so much more efficient.
Post by sparrowsong on Mar 13, 2018 12:12:12 GMT -5
I don’t think it would bother me in summer or in a temperate climate, but I don’t understand not having sidewalks in a place that gets snow. How can you walk in the street when there is slushy mess and/or ice from frozen run off, especially if plows are piling heaps of snow to the sides? It’s so much easier to have a walking space elevated from the gutter that can be shoveled.
What would you do if a road you drove on daily was blocked and nobody was doing anything about it? Finding out how one goes about getting a sidewalk cleared is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The folks in the DOT Of the county I work in most often get most of their cranky sidewalk calls from mobility impaired people who live in urbanized areas and don't have cars.
Knock on their door, shovel it myself, walk in the couple of inches if snow, do nothing while bitching about It, etc. It would never fucking occur to me to call the police and would be hung up on if I called.
I get the annoyance and the ADA compliance issue, etc but I can't think of one place I lived that the police would even take me seriously or that I could even track down the mayor. That is insanity to me but I know there a millions place where this does/can occur. It was very tongue-in-cheek
Post by sillygoosegirl on Mar 13, 2018 12:13:40 GMT -5
I prefer walkability. Sidewalks help with that, but are not the most important factor in deciding if I want to walk somewhere. Depending on the streets in question, sidewalks may or may not be important to me. We live in a neighborhood with sidewalks that frankly doesn't need them. I do like that we have them, but all the kids just play in the street anyway because there is so little traffic. We also looked for houses in a neighboring area without sidewalks that was similarly quiet. We rejected areas with and without sidewalks that didn't have good access to services on foot, or were on roads that were unpleasant for walking.
I live in the very center of the capital, and there is no ordinance for clearing the sidewalks. People just walk through the snow, and eventually it gets packed down into ice. Then people fall. Or they wear crampons around town.
Honestly, it's really weird. I wonder how much money the country would save on public healthcare if they didn't have to deal with all the people going to urgent care after falling on the ice.
(Meanwhile, they've started an initiative to encourage winter cycling, so the bike lanes are completely clean and clear, even though the sidewalks right next to them are an uneven icy death trap. A lot of people have started walking in the bike lanes this year.)
There really isn't a difference, especially when it comes to ADA laws, but ok.
Can you point me to the law? I'm only able to find regulations on the build/design requirements (which I am already familiar with). I see guidelines stating they should be in urban areas, non-interstate highway right-of-ways, commercial areas, and between commercial transportation stops. For the record, I do not disagree with you, I'm just trying to educate myself on the requirements so that I can speak intelligently instead of with anecdotal evidence.
I can't, but I can tell you that our City attorneys identified that the rural portions of our city needed to be brought up to ADA standards based upon what they were seeing with the direction of the lawsuits brought upon other municipalities.
I'm definitely in favor of sidewalks. My neighborhood has patches of sidewalks - new construction requires it, but our homes are all different ages and built under different codes (my house was in built 1929, my neighbor's across the street 1890s and doesn't have a driveway, next door is 1960s tract-style-without-the-tract). So the two blocks closest to the main street have sidewalks, and the city is putting in a sidewalk from the bike/pedestrian trail to the main street, but my block doesn't have any. I'd prefer it, but we had limited options in our budget, and closer to the city was a higher priority.
The main street that goes through our neighborhood has a sidewalk, and they have corner dips, but people in their wheelchairs still have to use the street instead of the sidewalk because they built the sidewalks with the telephone poles through them, and so there isn't clearance for wheelchairs. I found this out when a woman's electric chair broke down in the middle of the street, and I got out to help her. She let me push her home, and I started to go to the sidewalk, and that's when she let me know the chair wouldn't fit. The speed limit is 25, but the road sees lots of traffic, and it's a huge hazard.
Talking with a city council member, they installed those sidewalks after the ADA. This road goes to the neighborhood hospital and a HUD development, so it gets lots of use that requires accessibility. It's shameful. Last year the city started an assessment on our water bills that will fund ADA compliance projects, so at least there's a plan to fix it.
Absolutely sidewalks. DH grew up in a non-sidewalk neighborhood. I've never liked it.
Where we live, pretty much all neighborhoods have sidewalks - at least at the level we were looking at. It wasn't even an issue that I had to think about, luckily.
It was said above - I LIKE living in a neighborhood where I see people out and about walking. And kids playing and riding bikes, etc. I know this happens in non-sidewalk neighborhoods, but I DO wonder if it's gone down at all.
Parents get REALLY weird about letting their kids out and about. Take away sidewalks?? There are people in my neighborhood who would probably never let their kid off their lawn if there were no sidewalks!!
Post by simpsongal on Mar 13, 2018 12:18:23 GMT -5
Hehe, this is reminding me of calls from my brother asking if our hometown was "sidewalk worthy" yet. Newp.
The adjacent neighborhood has them, which is nice for Halloween. But it's the pits for family walks b/c they're so narrow and there are low cherry trees planted along the route (lots of ducking required). We have cul de sacs and a park, I much prefer being park & cul de sac adjacent. Until I had LOs, I don't think I realized how much kids like to play in the street. The sidewalk neighborhood has so many cars parked along the street there's nowhere for the kids to skate/scooter/bike.
Can you point me to the law? I'm only able to find regulations on the build/design requirements (which I am already familiar with). I see guidelines stating they should be in urban areas, non-interstate highway right-of-ways, commercial areas, and between commercial transportation stops. For the record, I do not disagree with you, I'm just trying to educate myself on the requirements so that I can speak intelligently instead of with anecdotal evidence.
I can't, but I can tell you that our City attorneys identified that the rural portions of our city needed to be brought up to ADA standards based upon what they were seeing with the direction of the lawsuits brought upon other municipalities.
Huh. Maybe the difference is incorporated versus unincorporated? My mom lives a good way from the nearest municipality and they *do* have sidewalks everywhere. I mean, this is Ohio I'm talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised if the local officials were just hurr-de-durr on this issue in general, but it seems like if sidewalks were required, they'd at least be starting to install them somewhere.
Knock on their door, shovel it myself, walk in the couple of inches if snow, do nothing while bitching about It, etc. It would never fucking occur to me to call the police and would be hung up on if I called.
I get the annoyance and the ADA compliance issue, etc but I can't think of one place I lived that the police would even take me seriously or that I could even track down the mayor. That is insanity to me but I know there a millions place where this does/can occur. It was very tongue-in-cheek
Do you live where it snows?
I'm over here LOL-ing at the reference to a "couple of inches" of snow. COOL STORY, BRO. Talk to me when you get a foot of snow.
And no, I do not carry my mini-shovel that I have only for digging out my car around with me so that I can shovel random people's sidewalks.
Sidewalks. I grew up in a city with almost no sidewalks and now live in one with sidewalks in basically every neighborhood. It’s something I now specifically look for when buying a house.
We have a sidewalk on our side of the street. DH snowblows the (town owned) sidewalk completely. Usually a day after a snow storm the town comes down with a sidewalk plow and plows the entire sidewalk. We have very little foot traffic though, at most 1 person/day.
Post by Velar Fricative on Mar 13, 2018 12:25:29 GMT -5
No sidewalks so the undesirables don't walk into my neighborhood. JUST KIDDING. But I see those kinds of statements even in NYC, though in the bumblefuck part of the city where no sidewalks could conceivably be a thing if possible. I do get irrationally annoyed at the one house in my neighborhood whose lawn goes all the way out to the curb so there's no sidewalk just in front of their house. I keep forgetting to check why that's allowed.
Anyway, Team Sidewalks4lyfe. Since walkability seems to be more desirable these days (or maybe that's just what HGTV is telling me), I hope the trend of creating sidewalk-less neighborhoods is dying down but realistically, it's probably not.
Post by Wallflower on Mar 13, 2018 12:27:02 GMT -5
I live in a rural area, so no sidewalks here. Also, while my neighborhood is quiet it is off a busy street, so we just don't get any walking traffic except people who live here. It would honestly look funny to me to have sidewalks here.
My mother's neighborhood has sidewalks, but at most of them are old and have been cracked/buckled by tree stumps. It is definitely not within any ADA codes. They get a lot of walkers/joggers/dog walkers (several dozen every day) but because the neighborhood is so quiet, they generally stick to the street, even in summer. In winter, when I have to clear the walks for her, my biggest challenge is that I don't like using the ice melt on the sidewalk across the front of the house because of the dog walkers - if they do try the sidewalks instead of the road, I'd rather not add to the chemicals their paws pick up.
I hate not having sidewalks. School is less than a 1/2 mile away, but there is nowhere for the kids to walk, so they take the bus.
I live literally across the street from our elementary school and 1 house down (so MAYBE 1/16th of a mile). My kid is eligible for school bus because there's no sidewalk connecting my house to the school (though there is a crossing guard at the corner to help them across the street). This is despite the rule that kids less than 1 mile away are not eligible for buses. It is so ridiculous and could be so easily solved with a sidewalk.
Disclaimer: I will not subject my kid to the bus for that. I'll walk him 200 feet to the corner where the crossing guard will be.
Can you point me to the law? I'm only able to find regulations on the build/design requirements (which I am already familiar with). I see guidelines stating they should be in urban areas, non-interstate highway right-of-ways, commercial areas, and between commercial transportation stops. For the record, I do not disagree with you, I'm just trying to educate myself on the requirements so that I can speak intelligently instead of with anecdotal evidence.
I can't, but I can tell you that our City attorneys identified that the rural portions of our city needed to be brought up to ADA standards based upon what they were seeing with the direction of the lawsuits brought upon other municipalities.
Hmmm..... I imagine it varies quite a bit by state and county, depending on their local laws, but I don't believe this is truly the case everywhere. As I understand the federal law, you are not under a strict obligation to make everything accessible to the disabled. Rather, there's a balancing test, and you only have to accommodate people with disabilities if its reasonable to do so. It's reasonable to require a two story Super Target to build escalators and elevators. It's not reasonable to require a mom and pop shop on the second floor of an old historic building to build an escalator. It's reasonable to require a subdivision with roads that lead somewhere that people would need to walk to to build sidewalks. It's not reasonable to build sidewalks in more sparsely populated communities, where homes are more than an acre apart, traffic is non-existent, and the nearest store or place of public accommodation is a couple miles away, i.e., not in an accessible walking distance for the disabled.
It is likely the case that some cities and states are going further than what the federal law requires, but as pro-sidewalk as I am, I do think the need for them really ought to be based on the nature of the neighborhood. Most suburban neighborhoods absolutely should have sidewalks. The more rural you go though, the more it seems to me to be a giant waste of money, and harmful to the environment in terms of the raw materials needed to build and the damage to the ecosystems in building it for little or no corresponding benefit.
I'm over here LOL-ing at the reference to a "couple of inches" of snow. COOL STORY, BRO. Talk to me when you get a foot of snow.
And no, I do not carry my mini-shovel that I have only for digging out my car around with me so that I can shovel random people's sidewalks.
I don’t even live where it snows! I’m just amused by the confidence of knowing exactly how she would respond when access to her house is blocked by mountains of snow. Not every city has a 311 system.
So, as you can see, people have very strong ideas about sidewalks. Our surveyors have had people pull guns on them when out surveying to implement sidewalk connections on city owned right of way.
I live in a rural area, so no sidewalks here. Also, while my neighborhood is quiet it is off a busy street, so we just don't get any walking traffic except people who live here. It would honestly look funny to me to have sidewalks here.
My mother's neighborhood has sidewalks, but at most of them are old and have been cracked/buckled by tree stumps. It is definitely not within any ADA codes. They get a lot of walkers/joggers/dog walkers (several dozen every day) but because the neighborhood is so quiet, they generally stick to the street, even in summer. In winter, when I have to clear the walks for her, my biggest challenge is that I don't like using the ice melt on the sidewalk across the front of the house because of the dog walkers - if they do try the sidewalks instead of the road, I'd rather not add to the chemicals their paws pick up.
You can buy paw friendly salt. It's pretty much the same price. It doesn't seem to bother my dog when we use it on the driveway.
I hate not having sidewalks. School is less than a 1/2 mile away, but there is nowhere for the kids to walk, so they take the bus.
I live literally across the street from our elementary school and 1 house down (so MAYBE 1/16th of a mile). My kid is eligible for school bus because there's no sidewalk connecting my house to the school (though there is a crossing guard at the corner to help them across the street). This is despite the rule that kids less than 1 mile away are not eligible for buses. It is so ridiculous and could be so easily solved with a sidewalk.
Disclaimer: I will not subject my kid to the bus for that. I'll walk him 200 feet to the corner where the crossing guard will be.
On rare occasion, if I'm staying home for some reason, I'll walk them. But they can't be there before 730, and I have to be at work by 8, and it's a 45 minute commute. I did stay at home just to walk them for Walk to School Day, but it's not realistic to do it every day. They are AMAZED that I walked to school every day.
I'm over here LOL-ing at the reference to a "couple of inches" of snow. COOL STORY, BRO. Talk to me when you get a foot of snow.
And no, I do not carry my mini-shovel that I have only for digging out my car around with me so that I can shovel random people's sidewalks.
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After today's snowfall we will have 30 inches of snow on the ground. We always clear our sidewalk. Many children walk to school. I absolutely hate it when people do not shovel their walks. It forces children onto the snow narrowed streets because it is to deep to walk in the snow covered sidewalk. Calling the police or contacting a town official seems reasonable to me.
So, as you can see, people have very strong ideas about sidewalks. Our surveyors have had people pull guns on them when out surveying to implement sidewalk connections on city owned right of way.
What would you do if a road you drove on daily was blocked and nobody was doing anything about it? Finding out how one goes about getting a sidewalk cleared is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The folks in the DOT Of the county I work in most often get most of their cranky sidewalk calls from mobility impaired people who live in urbanized areas and don't have cars.
Knock on their door, shovel it myself, walk in the couple of inches if snow, do nothing while bitching about It, etc. It would never fucking occur to me to call the police and would be hung up on if I called.
I get the annoyance and the ADA compliance issue, etc but I can't think of one place I lived that the police would even take me seriously or that I could even track down the mayor. That is insanity to me but I know there a millions place where this does/can occur. It was very tongue-in-cheek
Ok, if you've never lived in a place where you think you could get in touch with somebody in the mayor's office*, then you've also probably never lived in a place where code compliance falls to the police. They probably had a separate code enforcement office in the Public Works department. Smaller municipalities don't have all those layers. You sounded like a jackass mocking somebody for doing something totally reasonable that just happened to fall outside of your experience.
* - Also....I kinda want to go back to this. You seriously don't think you could get in touch with your mayor's office? Do you live in the US? Like, maybe not the mayor in person, but somebody in their office. You are aware that elected officials keep staff specifically for the purpose of interfacing with their constituents?