Truthfully, based on the state of our sidewalks in the richest cities of the US like NYC, SF, Chicago, and LA— we need to be replacing them maybe not every two or three years, but at least every 5. Right now it seems like 20, if we’re lucky. Meanwhile most towns and newer parts of smaller, less affluent cities, or even wealthier suburbs don’t even _have_ sidewalks.

I think it’s ultimately part of our philosophy toward the built environment that “Europe is built with screws, the US is built with nails”— we build something that gets the job done at the time it’s built, then never come back to it. Maybe that allowed us to build fast, but now the bigger issue is maintenance of what we already have.