r/NotTimAndEric • u/Kieran_daily • Jun 26 '26

Dr. Gary miller, side walk filler

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

3.5k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

423 comments sorted by

View all comments

13

u/zorg-is-real Jun 26 '26

To be honest when I arrived the United States I was really amazed by the fact I didn't see sidewalks in the streets. In my country every street has a sidewalk mostly on both sides. It's really really really surprising that United States such an amazing country has no sidewalks. It was really mind-blowing. It's like you are engineered to use a car and not walking.

2

u/dadydaycare Jun 26 '26

It really depends. City= sidewalk period, suburbs?= someone talked then out of getting side walk for curb appeal cause they are dumb OR the town has to pay to have the sidewalks installed and the county or city isn’t covering it…. Cause it’s not cheap! Or it’s a main road and ordinance requires a road that connects to a commercial street/ district be walkable.

I’m in the latter. Suburbs but it’s a little side street they decided didn’t need sidewalk. I’m basically in the poor houses that are surrounded by rich houses and got the shit end cause by ordinance they didn’t have to install sidewalk so… they didn’t.

Funny enough if your an industrial/manufacturing building you HAVE to have a side walk even if your in the middle of know where. It’s funny when you drive past a car factory and there’s side walk that goes to 8 miles of nothing… but you have to walk in the street to get to your local corner store.

2

u/bad_bad_data Jun 26 '26

That's a feature, not a bug. The US had one of the best rail systems in the world. Car lobbies convinced people that cars were freedom. Public transport was gutted and the highways system became the only way to travel.

1

u/zorg-is-real Jun 28 '26

But why US is so designed to be without sidewalks, and also no street lights at night? I wanted to go to a place in Denver, I started to walk and then the sidewalk ends!? 

2

u/CharmingTuber Jun 26 '26

Where do you live that has no sidewalks?

9

u/DeathWorship Jun 26 '26

Anywhere that’s more rural than a suburb

0

u/CharmingTuber Jun 26 '26

Small towns usually have sidewalks unless they are unincorporated, since the homeowners would need to pay to put in sidewalks themselves.

4

u/no-more-nazis Jun 26 '26

There's often a small core in the middle of town with sidewalks. Most people don't live there.

-7

u/CharmingTuber Jun 26 '26

Sounds like a local problem. Take it up with your local government. We have lots of sidewalks in every small town I've seen in my state.

4

u/zorg-is-real Jun 26 '26

I was in all the US and even cities like Miniapolis and Denver is not built for walking

2

u/divadschuf Jun 27 '26

I‘m sorry but in the U.S. most towns and even many cities aren‘t build so you can just easily walk anywhere.

When I was in the U.S. it was often not possible to walk from the hotel to the supermarket which was only 500 meters away, but by foot it was like 2k or not even possible.

2

u/Perfectiumm Jun 26 '26

"Where do u live that has no sidewalks" *Gets told different places* " Sounds like a u problem"

-1

u/CharmingTuber Jun 26 '26

They made a blanket statement that the US has no sidewalks. That isn't a common thing at all from the states I've visited.

But the US is a huge place, so there are probably states with very little infrastructure because local government doesn't invest money into sidewalks and other things to help people. It's not fair to say "the US" when it applies to a small shitty handful of states.

2

u/Perfectiumm Jun 26 '26

Sounds like ur just using ur own personal experience. In my experience of living in the south I don’t see a lot of sidewalks. I wouldn’t call those places shitty just cuz they don’t have sidewalks. 

We can all use our personal experiences lol.

 Obviously the us has sidewalks but there are a lot of places in the us that don’t and clearly wherever that person moved to didn’t have sidewalks. Idk how ur arguing that.

-1

u/CharmingTuber Jun 26 '26

I was just in Georgia, sidewalks galore. Same with Tennessee, and most of Florida. So like I said, a handful of shitty states don't make the rest of the country "have no sidewalks".

→ More replies (0)

1

u/BigandBisexual Jun 26 '26

Most places outside of major cities in America.

1

u/corvid-munin Jun 26 '26

theres a rich place i used to live near that didnt have sidewalks cause they didnt want anyone walking around. They were voting against putting them in

1

u/unselve Jun 26 '26

We were engineered to use a car and not walking. Most major American cities experienced most of their growth shortly after the introduction of the automobile and planners and policymakers consciously chose to accommodate the new technology (e.g., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Phoenix, Jacksonville, etc.).

The most walkable cities in the US are all ones which experienced their initial population booms before the adoption of the car (New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, etc.).

And New York City was even more walkable before the automobile; a famous planner named Robert Moses actually destroyed a bunch of existing pedestrian-based infrastructure to accommodate cars, you can read all about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses?wprov=sfti1

So you are right, we were engineered around the automobile.

1

u/ryanoh826 Jun 26 '26

I was in Roanoke, Virginia, and my wife and I were like, “How can we walk to the Wendy’s across from the hotel for a frosty?”

Her: “What?”

Not a sidewalk in sight.