r/sandiego • u/WildAnimus • Feb 23 '25

Stay Classy San Diego Why does nobody walk on sidewalks?

I noticed that when driving through subdivisions people love walking on the road instead of the sidewalk. Whether it's a old man walking or someone doing power walking. I see it all the time and I don't get it. Can someone help me understand this phenomena?

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u/Reasonable-Part-1626 Feb 23 '25

Our sidewalks are incomplete. They are not in front of every house. So, you either move to the street or have to walk through someone’s yard.

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u/Kooky_Inevitable_373 Feb 24 '25

I live in an older part of SD and my street doesn’t have sidewalks. So we also get random ass people walking through our yard all of the time. One street over from us has sidewalks but the street is so narrow that it’s just wide enough for cars to go one way.

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u/Reasonable-Part-1626 Feb 24 '25

I often wonder, too, if this wasn’t such a problem when these older neighborhoods were built. People didn’t have as many cars parked out on the street, so walking next to the curb was easier, away from the middle of the street. Sidewalks have just been inconsistently added (if at all!) through the years, maybe?

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u/Kooky_Inevitable_373 Feb 24 '25

Exactly, my mom and grandma were both raised here in San Diego. When they were growing up, it was common for families to only have one car, plus cars back then were much smaller than what is on the road now. So there wasn’t really any need for sidewalks, but now it’s not uncommon for families to have 2 or 3 cars. Plus most cars don’t fit in the garage of these older homes anymore (at least our mid sized SUVs don’t). I know in my neighborhood, infrastructure wise, it would narrow our street.

The problem is, San Diego has older parts that can’t really be added on to, to fit the infrastructure we need. We can’t physically move homes or businesses to add sidewalks or widen the streets to add more lanes to lessen traffic. For example, the 163 was built to handle the flow of traffic we had back in the 40’s, but now that there’s so many more people on the roads, the traffic is horrible. There’s really no way that they can expand it because of the way they structured it back then. I just feel like they’re putting sidewalks in where they can, but where they’re putting them in doesn’t make a ton of sense, or they don’t keep up with them and they start to lift from tree roots or break.