Where the Durham Sidewalk Ends
How much street frontage in the City of Durham has no sidewalk, and which organizations own the most of it. Most gaps front single-family homes. On busy collector and arterial streets, though, a small group of large owners accounts for a big share of the gap, so they are the natural place to start.
Select an owner in the table to show their frontage
No sidewalk within 25 ft
Sidewalk present
Shows collector/arterial frontage citywide, plus all frontage of the ranked owners.
Click a row to zoom.
| # | Owner | Missing, busy streets (mi) | Missing, all (mi) | % of frontage missing | Parcels |
|---|
Download: top_owners.csv · Built from City/County of Durham open data.
How this was measured
Method
- Frontage. Each parcel boundary inside city limits is cut into 10 ft pieces. A piece counts as street frontage when it is not shared with another parcel (so it borders the public right-of-way) and lies within 75 ft of a public street centerline. Interstates, ramps, alleys and private drives are excluded.
- Sidewalk. A frontage piece is covered when a sidewalk from the city's inventory lies within 25 ft. Raising this to 35 ft changes coverage by about one percentage point.
- Busy streets are collectors and arterials (minor and principal) in the city's street functional class.
- Owners. Names are normalized (punctuation and LLC/INC suffixes removed) and known variants are merged, e.g. Duke University with Duke University Health System, and the several spellings of Durham Public Schools and NCDOT.
Caveats
- Streets in new subdivisions that the city has not yet accepted are left out. Their sidewalks are usually required but not yet in the inventory.
- Some frontage is not a realistic sidewalk location: railroad corridors, steep creek banks, and frontage along limited-access roads that are classified as arterials.
- The parcel layer and the sidewalk inventory don't always line up, so individual parcels can be wrong. Treat owner totals as estimates and check specific sites before outreach.
- Only organizations are named. Parcels owned by individuals are shown on the map without a name.