Update: Since posting this article, I discovered that I miscalculated the total sidewalk square footage. While current ADA regulations require a minimum width of three feet, the walkway in front of our house is actually 46 inches wide, which I’ve rounded up to four feet. The new numbers reflect that correction, including the headline, which tags on an extra five dollars. I apologize for the errors, but this is still a pretty good deal. 

So far, I have stood before Jenkintown Borough Council twice to plead the case for better sidewalks and for a better way to pay for them. Both times, councilors asked a question I assumed was not rhetorical: “How would we pay for them without raising taxes?” Councilor Laurie Durkin reemphasized this point in her emails to me, with a not-so-veiled threat to raise taxes if we had to change current policy.

Over the past three weeks, I’ve studied the Borough’s budget, and I’m not yet convinced that the money for the work doesn’t already exist. However, let’s take the Borough at its word for a moment and estimate the cost of this project and assume that we’d need new money via property taxes to pay for it. How much would we have to pay?

Using Google Maps, I measured all the residential streets and calculated that we have a total sidewalk area of 194,744 square feet. According to an article on Angie’s List, one New York contractor said he’d charge a bulk rate of $7.50 per square foot for sidewalk reconstruction. I don’t think he’s estimating for quite this amount of sidewalk remediation, but still that equals $1,460,580 for the entire borough.

A properly constructed walkway should last at least 30 years. Due to wear and tear from vehicles, especially plows, curbs would have a shorter lifespan, but damaged incurred by third parties would make them liable. The above estimate does not include curbs, but there isn’t a civil engineer in the entire country that will tell you that it’s a good idea to pave whole streets without reconstructing curbs at the same time. Why we make this the homeowner’s responsibility is beyond the reasoning of anyone with at least a sixth grade education.

So, to cover a thirty-year sidewalk reconstruction program, our taxes would have to go up $24 per year. If you insist on including curbs, I expect we’d still be far under $100 per year.

I don’t know about you, but I’d happily pay twenty-five extra dollars per year into a dedicated streetscape fund in place of the current system. That aside, I hope to eventually prove that these funds — about $49,000 yearly — already exist within the current budget. The “contingency fund” alone has five times that amount.

Let’s discuss.

To give an idea of how Jenkintown prioritizes its pedestrian infrastructure, we should look at where it does choose to spend our money.

This blog has previously cited several times the 2009 parking lot project, and how it has impacted its budget. The budget supplied to me by Borough Manager George Locke shines some light on what can best be described as Jenkintown Parking, Inc. If run as an actual business, how would it currently fare?

For that project, the Borough borrowed and spent a net total of $1.4 million for the new parking lot bordered by Greenwood, Summit, and Leedom. Subtract the state grant to offset the cost of the project, and we have a $2.4 million investment.

As the chart shows, Jenkintown will pay $241,515 (projected 2014) in interest per year on that loan (which Deborra Sines-Pincoe has confirmed goes mainly to pay off the parking lot debt), but despite that major investment in downtown, the Borough will lose a projected $154,767 on parking.

You won’t see that in the budget, because the Borough does not associate the debt service with the parking revenues. Also, the budget does not break out the figures for what the Leedom Street parking lot alone actually collects in fees.

The lot reportedly exists to service downtown businesses, which have long cried out for more available parking in the commercial district. In 2008, when the Borough embarked on this project, the real estate market had already begun to plummet, and downtown already had a ghost town quality to it. Was parking really the issue? Or was it the lack of a business-friendly climate in the Borough?  (You might want to talk to a business owner who toughed out the bad time to get an answer.)

Remove the debt service, and the Borough’s parking business might move into the black even without the new parking lot — except for the potential disincentive that parking meters present to prospective customers, and its associated disincentive for new businesses to come to town.

Leaving that aside, if Jenkintown once applied the parking revenue to the infrastructure the meters stand, it no longer can do so. The money pay off the debt.

I subscribe to the school of thought that the more parking you have, the less you will ultimately need. I have lived and visited cities in town decimated by many things, but I can safely assert that no town has ever revived itself with more parking.

We have plenty of local examples. You will find a parking in tight supply in such places as Chestnut Hill, Manayunk, Hatboro, New Hope, and an up-and-coming Phoenixville, but plenty of sidewalk activity . The common thread running through most of these revivals is simply this: Downtowns are also neighborhoods. Clusters of people bring the businesses, not the availability of parking, not for the types of shops and restaurants we hope to attract to our borough.

Sadly, this is all traffic under the bridge. And if the Borough should decide to sell off its investment, what return do we think it might get? Anywhere close to the $2.4 million plus the accumulated debt service?

And research is starting to show the health consequences. Communities designed around more compact, walkable street grids — places that have what the Surgeon General calls “connectivity” — have been correlated in research with reduced rates of obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease (they also have fewer fatal car crashes, another public health problem). One study of a million residents in Toronto found that people in less walkable neighborhoods were more likely to develop diabetes.

The article makes an excellent case for the benefits of living in a walkable community — like ours — but like the hundreds that came before it, it fails to address the way we fund walkability in too many places. Since World War II, we have readily subsidized automobile usage, while here in Pennsylvania, sidewalks remain the bastard step-child of the the state’s transportation policy.

Source: The government is trying to make walking American again – The Washington Post