Your comment isn't particularly relevant to the discussion at hand, because at a very minimum we could have accessible sidewalks going everywhere the roads go.
The woman in the article simply wants to be able to go to various buildings in her city. She's not demanding an accessible sidewalk paved deep into the wilderness. So I don't understand where you're coming from in making a slippery slope argument about sidewalk construction.
Really? Sidewalks on every road is a big ask. There are a host of drainage issues that curbs/sidewalks create. It isnt as simple as laying down slabs of concrete. They need a base that is in some ways more demanding than that of the actual road.
I don't own a car. I barely know anyone who does. On the other hand, I do walk places every day.
I can't even begin to describe to you how absurd I find it that you think sidewalks along every non-interstate road shouldn't be mandatory.
When I was younger I lived in a much more suburban area than I do now, and when I stayed late for extracurricular activities in high school (two days a week) I had to take a different bus route home. The closest stop on that route was half a mile away from my house. That's not far at all, and I definitely don't mind walking, however, most of that walk was along a two-lane highway with no sidewalk that routinely had people cruising through at 45+ mph. The county has since thankfully put in some speed cameras to help enforce the 30 mph limit.
Why didn't I deserve a sidewalk for my safety, exactly?
Meanwhile, a typical two-lane undivided road costs about $4 million per mile to construct. So you're not willing to add on a scant 2.6% to the cost of the road construction to also make it available for use by pedestrians?
I'd much rather build 2.6% fewer roads and add sidewalks onto all of the existing ones. Keep in mind that far more than 2.6% of people don't even own cars, yet they do use sidewalks.
The expense argument you're making does a much better job of justifying not building more roads than it does in justifying not building more sidewalks.
That doesn't say anything about the cost of sidewalk relative to the cost of building a road. And that's retail prices, specced out by square footage. When you're building sidewalks at the scale of entire cities it's definitely cheaper.
You need to find a source that shows what the cost to the government is per mile of road versus mile of sidewalk. You can't compare retail prices of sidewalk that would be charged to homeowners to what the government is paying to build a road.
In my opinion, installing bicycle lanes and sidewalk is part of the job of building a new municipal street, in the same way that all modern limited-access highways need to have a breakdown lane on the shoulder and a crossover barrier in the median.
If you can only afford to do it half-assed, maybe instead try harder on fewer linear miles of road.
I think his point is that with less resources we could solve the general case by improving the ability of wheeled things that need to use sidewalks to navigate rougher terrain.
I don't think that was his point, which you can verify by his subsequent reply to my post. To me it looked like he was saying that since we can't make the entire planet 100% accessible (including the wilderness), why should we even bother with the urban cores of our cities? Meanwhile, he overlooked the fact that we've already made many more places accessible by roads than by sidewalks, even though roads are much more expensive and have higher maintenance burdens.
The woman in the article simply wants to be able to go to various buildings in her city. She's not demanding an accessible sidewalk paved deep into the wilderness. So I don't understand where you're coming from in making a slippery slope argument about sidewalk construction.