Sidewalks vary wildly, often with some nasty history. I grew up in Southern California and and was used to sidewalks pretty much everywhere, rode my bike to school a couple miles away in bike lanes, etc. I thought pretty much the same as you.
Then I moved to the east coast and, wow, there are visible fault lines from white racists losing Brown v. Board & other civil rights cases in the form of these suburbs built between 1950 and maybe 2000 which have no sidewalks, windy layouts designed to discourage visitors and prevent transit, no public pools but private ones, etc. One of my coworkers lives off of a very busy road which has a sidewalk from their neighborhood which ends abruptly a ¼ mile away in front of the house with the Confederate flag whose owner has gone to every meeting for like 40 years arguing that completing the connection to the park & bus stop will lead to a crime spree. Most of these places had racial covenants in the deeds which are no longer enforceable but definitely set a trend for the formative decades.
(This is not to say that California doesn’t have exclusionary suburbs – I used to ride my bike through some of the ones around San Diego where a Caribbean friend only rode when there was a group to vouch for him after he got tired of explaining to the local police why a black dude was on a nice bike – but they tend to be smaller and less inclined to forgo basic civic infrastructure. Even with that experience I was surprised by how widespread it was in a lot of cities we’ve visited from Florida up to Massachusetts)
Then I moved to the east coast and, wow, there are visible fault lines from white racists losing Brown v. Board & other civil rights cases in the form of these suburbs built between 1950 and maybe 2000 which have no sidewalks, windy layouts designed to discourage visitors and prevent transit, no public pools but private ones, etc. One of my coworkers lives off of a very busy road which has a sidewalk from their neighborhood which ends abruptly a ¼ mile away in front of the house with the Confederate flag whose owner has gone to every meeting for like 40 years arguing that completing the connection to the park & bus stop will lead to a crime spree. Most of these places had racial covenants in the deeds which are no longer enforceable but definitely set a trend for the formative decades.
(This is not to say that California doesn’t have exclusionary suburbs – I used to ride my bike through some of the ones around San Diego where a Caribbean friend only rode when there was a group to vouch for him after he got tired of explaining to the local police why a black dude was on a nice bike – but they tend to be smaller and less inclined to forgo basic civic infrastructure. Even with that experience I was surprised by how widespread it was in a lot of cities we’ve visited from Florida up to Massachusetts)