How to Design Sidewalks

Consult agencies and organizations that develop standards for sidewalks before beginning to design one. The Federal Highway Administration and Institute of Transportation Engineers offer detailed guidelines on placement of sidewalks along roadways, recommended slopes and grades, handicap access ramps and other features. Cities such as Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Abilene, Texas, have specific standards for width of walks for various uses, alignment, and distances from obstacles and surfaces.

Draw a detailed plan for a new sidewalk, using graph paper. Mark trees, light posts, walls, fences and any other obstacles to sidewalk construction or use. Illustrate the route, whether straight along a roadside or curved to avoid obstacles or join with other walkways. Provide specific dimensions of width, distance from street curbs, residential steps, business openings and driveways. Show all ramp locations, at all intersections of streets or other walkways, including the angle of ramp slope. List elevations to indicate grade of the walk and slope toward the street to allow water to flow off.

Choose sidewalk materials and develop specific installation plans. Once sidewalks were all gray concrete, but today's versions use bricks, colored concrete, paving stones or patterned concrete finished to look like bricks or stones. A sidewalk design should outline depths of excavation, any special base material, such as crushed and compacted gravel, and depth of paving material. Usually you pour residential concrete sidewalks on bare earth. Business and commercial walks and recreational walkways usually have a compacted gravel or sand base.

Have all designs and plans approved by the appropriate agency, a city department of public works, a state or county highway department or, for new residential development, a planning and zoning organization. Developers install most residential sidewalks according to municipal standards and then turn them over to the municipality. Virtually all residential sidewalks will be on public property. Business and commercial walks, in malls and shopping or office environments, may be on public property or on private land. It is important to know ownership of the sidewalk right-of-way.