The University of California Transportation Center (UCTC) at Berkeley recently published two reports on issues related to sidewalks and pedestrian travel in its magazine ACCESS.  The first is titled “Fixing Broken Sidewalks.”  In this report, Donald Shoup describes the need for communities to maintain sidewalks and outlines a “point-of-sale program” to help pay for maintenance, calling such a program micro-loans for such public investments. 

The second article, “Vibrant Sidewalks in the United States: Re-integrating Walking and a Quintessential Social Realm,” looks at the history of sidewalks and argues for a broader, not merely functional, understanding of the role or purpose(s) of sidewalks in a community.  It concludes that -- though it may seem counterintuitive -- “if we wish to encourage walking for transportation, we need to make sidewalks places for more than just movement.”