Sidewalks of Marbach

The sidewalks of Marbach are an odd thing, at least to me. Never do I see what I thought was the prototypical sidewalk: concrete slabs protected from the street by a buffer zone of grass or mulch and usually raised above street level by a several-inch curb.

Very seldom is there any space between road and sidewalk. When there is, it looks like the sidewalk is actually just a paved or bricked footpath where people were constantly taking a shortcut and the town decided to make it official, as here:

Most akin to the sidewalks of my States-based experience are what I think of as the Curbed Asphalt sidewalks, like this one:

A runner-up as least unusual to my experience is the Curbed Brick sidewalk:

Due to the lacking buffer zone, these do feel pretty cramped to an Ohio girl, but a lot of the town is designated as pedestrian-friendly, so even where there is both a sidewalk and a road, pedestrians are allowed to use the road as a sidewalk that is sometimes invaded by cars that have to wait for pedestrians to get out of the way on their own time. My space-loving, vehicle-bereft self is a big fan of this.

So, you might be wondering what it looks like when there is not both a sidewalk and a road. Here are a couple of examples of what I think of as Drivable Pedestrian Walkways:

 There is absolutely nothing in the design of the brick that distinguishes between where pedestrians are supposed to walk and where cars should drive. It might appear that the brick is straight near the edges and curved in the middle, but the pattern doesn't hold as one that distinguishes driving areas from walking ones. There are places where a different pattern in the brick does seem to designate the pedestrian-dominated edges, like here:

OK, so I almost always go out at night, so you can't really see what is going on here, but the stones in the middle of the road are larger than the ones on the edges, seemingly marking where cars and pedestrians can each have precedence if they are forced to share.

All driving in these areas is very slow. I should look up German driving laws because no speed limit signs are posted, so I think everyone just knows that there is a very low maximum speed limit.

Here is one that took me a while to classify: the Un-demarcated Driveway. You can hardly tell in the photo below that this car is parked in a driveway in front of a garage. There is nothing different about the (minimal) curb or sidewalk to say that a car might pull up and park here. It is just the fact that there is a garage and a paved area in front of it that signals that this part of the sidewalk might sometimes be obstructed by a vehicle.

 Right next to that is an example of another way sidewalks are differentiated from parking zones: brick amidst the asphalt. A little white sign specifies that this is, indeed, a "parkplatz" and a "privat" one, at that. Again, there is nothing different about the sidewalk around this to signal that cars use the sidewalk, too.

My favorite to photograph, though, is the magical Disappearing Sidewalk, of which I have many examples to choose from:

I didn't realize until I saw this how much of a design choice it is in the States that most sidewalks, if they do not form a loop, just end abruptly. I don't know that I've ever seen a sidewalk in the States taper away. I think that, if I had, I'd have photos of it because it does strike me as strange and photo-worthy every time I encounter it here.