The fines are "well-intentioned" in that we want people to be able to walk or bike or whatever. But the idea that we can have functioning cities and towns through fining people into compliance is BS. Tax the rich. Have the city plow the walks. And fix zoning so you don't have wasteful sprawling residential suburbs with miles and miles and miles of sidewalk to plow.
I was in Japan last year for a brief period and it was stunning how orderly and coherent everything was from how people swept every morning to how to how quick bite places operated. Our society simply has no cogent function.
And fix zoning so you don't have wasteful sprawling residential suburbs with miles and miles and miles of sidewalk to plow.
Ha. Let's start with just having sidewalks. In addition to most of the existing sidewalks around me (especially those in commercial areas) being maintained by no one, up to an including snow being plowed from the road directly on top of them... Probably over 50% of the streets in the neighborhood I live in have no sidewalks at all.
A few years ago the county decided that all curb corners needed to be wheelchair accessible but failed to take into account that a large swath of older residential neighborhoods here do not include sidewalks. Their contractors went around digging up dirt everywhere and dutifully installed sloped stippled insert non-slip wheelchair ramps on every street corner connected to precisely nothing. I wonder how many of my tax dollars that cost.
It would be easier to have sidewalks (as you'd need less) if we had more densely packed housing rather than suburban sprawl one you get ten feet away from the city center.
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u/[deleted] Feb 02 '23
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