Rainforest
Senior Member
No need to assume. Moderator ShonTron created this awesome interactive map showing where all the sidewalks are in this city.
That's quite interesting.
Looking at the map, I can see that:
a) There are very few streets, either in Scarborough or elsewhere in 416, with no sidewalks on either side. Such streets tend to concentrate in the presumably rich areas, where all the folks own cars and are too lazy to walk when they can drive.
b) The vast majority of streets have a sidewalk at least on one side, which is fine for residential streets and for the majority of pedestrians. That answers my question as of how they get to their buses.
c) Even if the one-side-only sidewalks do not fit the tastes of the modern urbanists, such built forms are not special to Scarborough. Their proportion in North York and Etobicoke is roughly same as in Scarborough.
Some of the pockets with a high proportion of one-side sidewalk and no sidwalk streets are located in the close proximity of the Yonge subway line (north of Lawrence and all the way to Steeles). To my knowledge, nobody is proposing to close Yonge subway because the said "pedestrian-unfriendly" pockets are the cause of low ridership counts