Why is it called A New Sidewalk?

I didn't even notice the lack of sidewalks.  When I bought our house in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2004, I didn't notice that the nearest sidewalk was four blocks away.  If you've ever bought a home, maybe you'll sympathize with me; we often overlook something that becomes important later.

In my defense, I was distracted by history.  I grew up in a quiet suburban neighborhood in a smallish Indiana town.  No sidewalks in that neighborhood, either.  There was so little traffic we never seemed to miss them.  (That's the house in the photograph.  Nice neighborhood, except for the occasional ice storm.)

Growing up, my family vacationed on Florida's Gulf coast almost every year.  It was, and still is, common among Midwesterners.  I could walk for hours on the beach and be perfectly happy.  Isn't the beach just a sidewalk for the ocean?  So I grew up with a nostalgic affection for coastal Florida.  Even when I lived in California, I imagined that one day I would live near the Gulf of Mexico.

Julie and I lived in North Carolina from 2001 to 2004.  Of course, we lived in a neighborhood without sidewalks.  Those were boom years for Florida real estate.  We decided to buy into the St. Petersburg housing market even before moving here.  (Don't laugh - you probably didn't see the housing market collapse coming, either.  That's a topic for another day.)  I came to St. Petersburg for a weekend in early 2004, spent a day on a whirlwind tour of houses, and took a bunch of photos to show Julie when I returned.  It was snowing heavily in North Carolina the day we looked at photos of houses in sunny Florida.

Given this history, I think I deserve some slack for not thinking about sidewalks.  Another factor in my favor, there is a county-wide recreational trail across the street.  Plenty of walking/running/cycling to be done there.

In his book The City Assembled, architectural historian Spiro Kostof speculates that the first sidewalks may have been built around 2000-1900 BC in the merchant colony of Kültepe, in what is now Turkey.  They didn't become widely used until the late 1800s.  In modern-day suburbs, like my current neighborhood, zoning and low density work against sidewalks.  Zoning keeps out retail that might benefit from sidewalk traffic.  Housing spread out in single-family homes with yards results in fewer people per block in need of a pedestrian-friendly area (and greater distances usually make walking anywhere impractical).  It's no surprise that sidewalks can dramatically improve safety for pedestrians.  And they can serve multiple purposes beyond the obvious pedestrian transit route.

Like the neighborhood where I grew up, our current neighborhood has little motor vehicle traffic.  But the streets are narrower; the drivers here are faster and less civil.  Certainly faster than traffic in ancient Kültepe.  Julie and I both enjoy walking and we miss having sidewalks.  We like living in St. Petersburg, it's just, well, we should have been looking for a neighborhood with sidewalks.  Lesson learned.