As someone who is an avid walker, sidewalks are really important to support that lifestyle.  In a metro area such as Atlanta where the automobile is king, having the relative safety of not being on the road while walking becomes quite important.  I know there’s drivers in every city who simply don’t respect or don’t pay attention to pedestrians but this city is famous for being very dangerous for those of us who actually walk.

Our suburb is the first one east of Atlanta; therefore it’s an old established town.  The one drawback to that is that a majority of the town’s homes were built when there was even less regard for pedestrians and sidewalks simply didn’t exist except in the town square area.  Everywhere else it was assumed you would drive to get to your destination.  Therefore most of the side roads off the busy streets don’t have any sidewalks.  Thankfully this is a pretty progressive town by most standards (a “blue” island amid a sea of “red” in the country’s reddest state) and they now are putting a sidewalk on every street (on at least one side).  This will ease my mind when I take my daughters to the park and can take the back streets instead of being forced to walk on the busy street’s sidewalk.

When we lived in the Wasteland Known As Gwinnett County in Dacula, we built a house in the earlier phase of the subdivision.  During this time, the houses that were made had thin sidewalks placed in front.  They were almost too thin to pass someone walking the opposite way without having to almost step on someone’s lawn.  About halfway through the creation of all the houses, the sidewalks in front of the newer houses all had what I would consider a standard sized width sidewalk.  The problem was that in order to make the sidewalk connect in one continuous piece, there was an angled piece that connected a small chunk to a large chunk.  This was repeated throughout the subdivision and it really looked fucking stupid.  What I bet happened was that the county finally realized the developers were skimping on the width of sidewalks and forced them to change to standard size halfway through.  Of course this didn’t rectify the fact that half the houses had a substandard width and simply made the walkways look as though they were created by amateurs.

Thankfully the sidewalks were wide in Chicago since those were the Prime Drinking Years where we needed a wide berth when stumbling home from the local pubs.  This allowed us some wiggle room when it came to being close to falling into the street and getting run over by a cab.  Sometimes it gave me too much wiggle room, as I succumbed to certain stupid temptations as flicking lit matches on the roofs of police cars parked at the police station on my way home from bars near Wrigley.  But like all my misadventures in Chicago and Detroit, if you weren’t caught but The Fuzz, you weren’t really committing a crime.