It’s been 50 years since the sociologist Mark Granovetter published his landmark study celebrating “weak ties” — the casual everyday relationships that add to the stronger connections with family and close friends and make a critical contribution to human well-being in any town or city. Weak ties are the informal contacts we make at the grocery store, at the pharmacy, at the bank, in church and in a whole array of other places we frequent. They bring order and opportunity to our lives. But the most important locus of these contacts may be one we tend to forget about: the plain old sidewalk. … Sidewalks are such an important part of urban social life that it seems a shame cities don’t do a better job of creating and maintaining them. A recent study by the urban planner Todd Litman concluded that the average city spent about 1 percent of its infrastructure budget on sidewalks, even though walking accounted for 11 percent of residents’ trips every day and pedestrian fatalities constituted 17 percent of all traffic deaths.
Source: Governing
