Cognoscenti2%
Inclusive and accessible cities start with well-maintained sidewalks 33%
By Barbara Thimm44%
7/14/2026, 5:07:11 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 2 faulty reasoning types, including False Dilemma, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 5.7% saturation with 56 hits. Analysis detected 112 faulty-reasoning hits from 981 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 41.4% and a BS Rank of 33% (10,641 of 15,741 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 67.60% of the article peer group.
A year ago, my husband came home from the hospital after a stroke to our house in Cambridge.
Needing a wheelchair, at least for now, is one of the many challenges we have to live with.
We are lucky to live in a one-level house with an accessible bathroom and wide doorways.
We are also lucky that we live in a neighborhood with coffee shops, a supermarket, a pharmacy and a barber.
It is walkable, but with difficulty, even for me, a 59-year-old woman in excellent shape.
And it will not be walkable for my husband, once he uses a walker or a cane.
The sidewalks are the problem.
It is a historic neighborhood, so unlike in some newer neighborhoods, sidewalks do exist here.
And they make our streets look very walkable.
Many sidewalks are paved with bricks and others feature large concrete slabs.
But the sidewalks suffer from what feels like decades of neglect, patchy interventions and odd obstructions.
In short, the sidewalks in Cambridge are not only a missed opportunity in the city’s quest for accessibility and inclusivity; they are also a real barrier to livability in Cambridge, and not only for the frail and elderly.
The difficulties are many.
We face a variety of obstacles on the 500-yard stretch between our house and the closest coffee shop, no matter which side of the road we take.
The brick surfaces turn slippery in cold weather.
In many places, tree roots push from below, creating uneven welts and widening clefts.
Elsewhere, large, newer concrete pavers provide smoother surfaces, except where the ground below has shifted, creating inch-high ridges at the transitions in between them.
Navigating a wheelchair requires vigilance, strength, trial and error: Where the surface is too uneven, I have to tilt the chair towards me to use only the larger rear wheels.
If that doesn’t work, I can turn the chair around to get a better purchase by pulling it over the ridge.
If all else fails, we divert to the street.
And that is not all.
In some spots, holes and ridges have been patched with tar, creating yet another transition and more unevenness.
In others, the access points to gas pipes jut from the sidewalk like square hockey pucks glued to the ground.
Cut-outs for trees, many newly planted, narrow the sidewalk to 20 inches or less at regular intervals, just wide enough for our slim travel wheelchair, but not wide enough for a double stroller, someone walking with grocery bags or guiding a toddler, and downright hazardous for a person using a cane.
It’s not that the city doesn’t care about infrastructure.
Yet the maintenance of sidewalks does not seem to be a priority.
At any given time, hundreds of public complaints are on record in the city’s 311 system.
These numbers show that our predicament is not anecdotal and not confined to one neighborhood.
It is a systemic problem.
A friend reported tree root damage to the sidewalk in front of her house after tripping repeatedly over the welt it had caused.
She was told to wait for an arborist to get in touch.
The call never came.
Many investments over the last few years have been aimed at reducing and managing car traffic — an admirable goal — such as the creation of bus and bicycle lanes and the inclusion of $250,000 for speed bumps in the city’s 2025 participatory budget.
The Cycling Safety Ordinance of 2019 and its 2020 amendment require the city to install 25 miles of separated bike lanes within seven years.
The goal of the Main Street Safety Project is to improve pedestrian crossings and traffic flow, billed as a “key piece in the City of Cambridge’s plan for a safe, connected bicycle network.”
Since 2023, repeated construction work on Massachusetts Avenue has included "partial construction that involves paving the street, removal of the concrete median, and installing new pavement markings.”
Garden Street was converted from a two-lane street into a one-lane street with bike lanes on either side.
All these initiatives show that the city is willing to make significant investments in shaping its infrastructure, which makes it all the more puzzling that sidewalks have been left to fall into disrepair.
The deterioration of sidewalks in Cambridge is not an isolated phenomenon.
Many cities in the U.S. grapple with the consequences of decades of neglect: Los Angeles settled a class action disability rights lawsuit in 2016, but improvements are slow due to a lack of information and unsuitable repair strategies.
In Chicago, multiple programs aimed at failing sidewalks exist, yet they suffer from insufficient information and coordination between city agencies and utilities.
These examples show that commitment is only the first step in any effort to improve sidewalks in urban environments.
Large-scale improvement hinges on solid data, coordination across agencies and property owners and ongoing engagement from communities.
Throughout my life, certain events have fundamentally affected how I interact with where I live.
With the birth of my first child, I became painfully aware of early-morning construction, unshoveled snow, narrow doorways and inattentive drivers.
When my children were toddlers, I noticed dog feces, trash and rats.
But nothing compares to the sense of alienation I experience now when I try to take my husband for a walk in a neighborhood we’ve lived in for the last 10 years.
Catching up on years of neglect will take time, and it seems likely that my husband and I will have to move before meaningful change occurs.
It looks as if the City of Cambridge, for all its talk about accessibility and inclusivity, cares more about bikes and bus lanes than well-maintained sidewalks, which would allow residents who are impaired, elderly or just willing to engage with their environment on foot instead of in a car, to walk with dignity and without fear.
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