Share the road.

Yadda, yadda, diversity, tolerance, multifaceted understanding about where people come from, but I just don’t get this:  Why on earth would anyone be opposed to her neighborhood having sidewalks?

OK, I get this:  If you put in a sidewalk I lose a chunk of lawn.  It’s self-centered (and inaccurate; the city has had the legal right all along) but self-centered is easily understood.  And I get this:  It’s not worth the tax dollars and trouble.  A mere calculation of benefits vs. risks.  But the folks interviewed in this article appear to be opposed to sidewalks per se.  Evil things.  Encourage common rabble to walk in front of your house.  And they’re bad for senior citizens too.

Perhaps my blindness to this comes from never having lived in a neighborhood without sidewalks.  I grew up in an older first-ring suburb and played on the sidewalk every day as a child.  I was not allowed to set foot in the street even to cross it until I was about ten years old. 

Today I live in the inner city, and my children play on the sidewalk here.   Our street is residential, but cars speed down it regularly;  I have seen empty Minneapolis school buses going at least 45 mph past my house.    A good friend of mine recently moved to a sidewalkless suburban cul-de-sac.  The children in that neighborhood ride their Big Wheels and bicycles merrily in circles in the middle of the street and nobody seems to mind!   I guess that if I had grown up in this kind of situation I would think that the street is a perfectly normal place for children to sit down in the middle of the street, right there on the blacktop, are their parents nuts?!?!  but it is rather hard for me to get into that mindset.   It is too ingrained in me that little children aren’t supposed to play in the street.   That cars + children = bad.    Whenever my kids are out there I feel like there’s a little buzz in my ear all the time keeping me on heightened alert.  It’s not so bad in the middle of the day, but when there are more people driving home from work and teenagers in their big honkin’ pickup trucks careening around to drop off their friends after school, it’s really hard for me to relax about it.

Perhaps I need to get over this, at least when I visit the suburbs…