Sidewalk To Nowhere

My wife had a sixth foot surgery Thursday, to correct a hammertoe that was a consequence of having broke her foot a decade ago. Today I wheeled her into the doctor's office.

As we drove north on Franklin Blvd., you can't help but notice all the new construction work tearing out the old fixed corners and adding wheelchair ramp accessible corners. There must be a few hundred thousand of these throughout the Sacramento region, and for the past dozen years crews have been slowly replacing them all.

Sidewalks, where they are used, are not amenities -- they are a fundamental part of our urban transportation system. But they aren't used on Franklin Blvd. I do not know how to say this without sounding like an insensitive prick, but spending money on Franklin Blvd., miles from anywhere, to change a sidewalk that nobody uses is the ultimate in fiscal insanity. You can bitch all day long about how much you pay in taxes, but you're gonna pay to have these installed on a street that not one single wheelchair bound person will ever, ever use.

Why am I so sure? First of all, in fifteen years, I ain't seen one wheelchair on this part of Franklin. Zero. Secondly, if healthy two-legged people won't use the fucking sidewalk to hoof it two and a half miles to the store, why would anyone who's crippled? Thirdly, you can argue that all people have to do is wheel themselves to a bus stop, but the bus stops in the southbound direction aren't at corners:

Note: Bike shown for scale

What, is someone gonna bounce the curb, across two lanes of fifty mile an hour traffic, up the curb into the bushed over median, down the curb, across another two lanes of fifty mile an hour traffic, and back up the curb?

This is one more reason, atop a hundred thousand other reasons, why suburbia is such a colossal waste of our national wealth, why city councils are constantly looking for creative ways to grow their tax bases because suburban property taxes don't come close to paying for all these billions of feet of concrete, reinforcing steel, asphalt, sewer lines, etc., and then to come back a dozen years later to add wheelchair ramps.

The taxes paid don't cover the services provided, so urban core property taxes subsidize suburban sprawl, or else the city has no choice but to continue to grow, to build more houses, and to tax future residents, an unsustainable proposition. Why is it that every, every! suburban city in America is fiscally upside down? Is it possible that because new construction has ground to a halt and every city government was planning on future revenues that have failed to materialize?