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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

> it would be nice if we had more sidewalks, but they are financially unsustainable

I call bullshit.

The smallest 50 people village in the Netherlands has sidewalks. It’s not that it’s unsustainable, it’s that nobody wants to pay for it. Or that americans build too friggin big.

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Indeed. It's a very strange argument - sidewalks require significantly less to sustain.

For a start, the build quality can be a lot lower - a sidewalk doesn't need to support lorries with 13t loads.

As for maintenance, the damage to them is far less, and repairing a sidewalk would usually be a small diversion rather than the drama of a road closure.

I'm not quite sure why anyone would think sidewalks are an unthinkable burden.

$350k per mile length of a 6 foot wide sidewalk. That's what people don't want to spend money on.

Where did you get that figure?

Here's Virginia's cost guidelines for roadway[1] (2000, so the numbers are surely higher now). Even at $350k/mile, sidewalk is 2/3 the cost of a paved suburban road.

1 - https://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/gasb-roadway_...

It depends on the city/state/county you are in and the local building codes. The city I grew up in the code was to have a sidewalk in pretty much all new construction building conditions except in some very narrow ones. It was very nice. Biking/walking was easy and 'built in'. The sidewalk at my parents house I think is the original one the builder put in, in the 1940s. With a small segment replaced because tree damage. If you DIY the cost is fairly low, just a lot of work. But if you hire a contractor to do it, the cost can spiral pretty quickly. If the cost is folded into the price of the house you would not notice it much. But to add on after the fact it can be a bit of sticker shock.

In Netherlands, if you throw a stone, you will hit a house in neighboring village. Not so in US.

(European here; but I've spent some time in US. You seriously underestimate the distances in US).

His point is that our highly dispersed environment is largely of our own making. Particularly low density suburbs, where you have to drive to get milk and eggs, you have to drive to go to school, you have to drive to work. Literally nowhere to walk - if you're relatively wealthy, you might have a neighborhood pool and tennis courts.

There's no good reason these suburbs can't be more walkable, it's mostly adding sidewalks that link to other places. And possibly smaller schools (and the 4000+ pupil high schools we get are a whole different problem).

What about the largest 50 person village?

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