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Comment by wasdfff | Hacker News Reader

I saw a road in my neighborhood go from trenches along the road to full storm drains and sidewalks, for seemingly zero reason but to let the existing owners appraise their homes for $10k more. The trenches were fine in practice and never spilled over even in the worst storms. This suburb of 15 thousand people is currently millions of dollars in the hole doling out shortsighted handouts like this, and there are thousands of suburbs just like this one.

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I’m not sure where you are, but I can’t imagine anywhere where sidewalks don’t make sense. Upkeep is orders of magnitudes cheaper than maintaining a street, and provides incentives for people to leave their cars behind, especially for shorter trips, further reducing wear and tear on roads.

Keeping roads in shape for multi-ton vehicles to barrel down them is expensive. Keeping them in shape for humans, not so much.

There's no reason to have sidewalks in suburbs or rural areas where anything you'd reasonably want to walk to is miles away.

As a suburban kid I walked a few miles a day to school and back and so did a good number of classmates.

It would have been far more dangerous without sidewalks.

The thought process of your post forms a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course if you build with only a single mode of transport in mind, the majority of people will opt towards that mode of transportation. Unfortunately, many suburbs and small cities have made that mistake and also chose the most expensive mode, hence the article.

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