I grew up with sidewalks and learned after moving here that I had taken them for granted. For those who don’t know, sidewalks are a novelty in Wilmington. What’s interesting is a lot of the older neighborhoods - the historic district, Princess Place and Carolina place for example, have sidewalks where as most newer neighborhoods don’t.

On the other hand, maybe that’s not so interesting. It seems we live in an age where true quality is rare (think service, clothing, movies) and everything has been rung dry for profit. In the community where I live, there are no sidewalks and the streets are so narrow that the HOA has forbidden cars to park on them overnight. This rule makes sense I suppose, I mean, with streets so narrow that a car can’t fit through if two cars are parked on either side, you’re begging for an accident if you leave your car by the curb after dark. But why should we pay fines for parking on streets that developers intentionally made narrow to save on expenses and increase profit?

That being said, this post isn’t meant to be a rant. I simply wanted to introduce and add to an editorial I read in last night’s paper on the topic of traffic and poorly designed subdivisions. The below snippets comes from Star News September 25th page 8A.

There are plenty of reasons why people speed and few ways to slow them down.

Much of the problem around here stems from the way local government planned - or failed to plan - for today’s traffic.

When residential neighborhoods are built as self-contained little worlds connected to the outside by one or two streets, those streets are going to be busy. When parallel thoroughfares remain unconnected for stretches of a mile or so, the few connector streets are going to be busy…

We can’t make people slow down merely by lowering speed limits…

What we can do is require sane traffic design in new development.

What we can do is require sidewalks along busy streets in new neighborhoods and start laying them along busy streets in existing neighborhoods. It’s dangerous enough for drivers to enter and proceed along such streets. For pedestrians, bike riders, children, and pets, it’s verging on suicidal.

So what’s your opinion?  Did you grow up with sidewalks?  Is it worth paying more for a home to get them?  Please let us know what you think!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Rants and Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.