a street also has less dogshit than a sidewalk.

Oh thank you for this Charles. It is going to be a jungle of a day, and this has helped to calm my nerves.

It sounds like he shares perspectives with Jane Jacobs' discussions of sidewalks as public spaces that contribute to the health of communities. A second thank-you for the pleasant topics.

This brings to mind an interesting NYT article about how the car changed our experience of cities, since pedestrians used to be much less confined to one narrow edge of the sidewalk-street-sidewalk expanse. I read it shortly after a visit to New York and enjoying the closed-to-traffic Times Square and a weekend market on Sixth Avenue amid ornate former department stores. Things look different from the middle!

A sidewalk is for walking. It's on the SIDE of the street, so you can WALK. If you want to kiss and play, go to the park and get out of my way. I'm walkin' here.

You need to take the comma out of "It is a pubic space, and a public space"

Sidewalks ARE public spaces, but so are streets. Sidewalks are PART of streets. The idea that streets are highways, for the rapid passage of vehicles and no other use, is morally and structurally wrong. Streets are where the life of the city takes place; they are where the life of the city is displayed. Shops and restaurants don't line parks; they line streets. Parks have their place; but that place is mostly empty, and it's not a place where life IS, it's a place where life GOES, every once in a while. Streets are where the action is. Sidewalks are part of streets.

@3 I thought of Jane Jacobs as well. Nice wide sidewalks, so people can stop and chat, and not block other people walking through, greatly benefit their communities.

"It is a pubic space..."

Best typo ever.

@8, that's what you would think, but research proves you wrong.

It is NARROW sidewalks, with lots of furniture and obstructions, that foster conversation and interaction. Read the work of William Whyte, for instance: he actually studied sidewalk interaction for many years, filming and analyzing them. He didn't just make up stuff that sounded reasonable. The places where people stop and talk is ALWAYS at the narrowest choke points. Wide, wide sidewalks, plazas, big empty areas -- these are the places people shy away from, don't like going, feel uncomfortable in, hurry across, can't wait to get away from.

He mentored Jane Jacobs, by the way. Everyone likes to namecheck her but for some reason it's almost always in the service of ideas that are diametrically opposed to hers. Segregating traffic and pedestrians completely is anti-urban.

You should read "City: Rediscovering the Center" and "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces". I wish someone in the City of Seattle would.

@4, before cars streets were a nice thick gumbo of mud and horseshit. During the summer they were dust; cities used to send water sprayers up and down sprinkling them to keep the dust down. That's the dust of dried horseshit, by the way. The original purpose of sidewalks was not to protect people against cars, because there were no cars; it was to keep people out of the mud and horseshit (and more than a few dead horses, too). Any idea that people used to hang out in the middle of the busy street in the days of mud and horseshit and flying carriages is ahistorical.

This is one reason why the sidewalkless suburbs are killing children's souls.

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@1, but a sidewalk has less horseshit than a street... and I don't mean historically, as in @11, but literally today.. .with all those fancy carriages and police horses in downtown Seattle, there's horsepoop a-plenty in the eveningtime.

Anyway, sidewalks themselves have fewer dog rockets than do the grass strips between sidewalk and street. And at least we don't have packs of feral dogs running around & pooping everywhere with abandon like most central and southern American nations seem to. Well, them and Detroit. So count your blessings, or go traveling and get some more perspective.

@5, Wow, grumpy much? I personally love to see people kissing on the sidewalk and doin' it in the road. But maybe I'm the weird one.

@12,

It's not just Central and South America. The French, for example, disdain picking up their dogs' shit. So, watch out!

@13, yes, but the French have an army of adorable little green trucks driving around vacuuming the dogshit up, at least in Paris. And they use carpets and hoses to dam the sidewalks every morning and wash them off. Paris sidewalks are spotlessly clean compared to ours.