Why You Don't See What's Right in Front of You & The Surprising Truth About Sidewalks

Stores and restaurants don't just play music to fill the silence. The tempo, volume, and even the style of music are often carefully chosen because they can quietly influence your behavior and even how much money you spend. Once you know what's happening, you'll start hearing those playlists very differently. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002224298204600313 Your brain performs an astonishing magic trick every second of every day. It decides what deserves your attention—and what doesn't. Most of the time that's incredibly helpful. But it also means important clues, costly mistakes, opportunities, and even obvious dangers can sit right in front of you without you ever noticing them. Why does that happen, and can you train yourself to see what you've been missing? Here to explain is Keelan Leyser, a digital illusionist and one of the world's leading experts on attention and perception. Along with the late neuropsychologist David Lewis, he is co-author of the book Unseen: Blind Spots and Why We Miss What Matters Most (https://amzn.to/4ylvxkh). Most of us walk on sidewalks without giving them a second thought. But once you start asking simple questions—Who actually owns the sidewalk? Who is responsible to maintain it? Why do some sidewalks suddenly end? And why do some streets have no sidewalks at all? —you discover that sidewalks are surprisingly complicated and have become the center of debates over property rights, public space, safety, and even free speech. Michael Pollack takes us into a world that's been hiding in plain sight. He is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of the book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource (https://amzn.to/4fBOhEJ). When you suddenly need to buy something—a new refrigerator, a laptop, a plane ticket, almost anything—it's easy to assume you have no choice but to pay whatever it costs. In reality, there's one surprisingly simple habit that can keep "must buy it now" moments from quietly costing you hundreds of dollars over time. https://www.consumerreports.org/money/shopping/how-to-save-money-shopping-online/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 0:44Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:22Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, the real reason they play music in stores and restaurants. Then, understanding your blind spots, the things you miss that are right in front of you.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Every single second, your senses are bombarded with 400 billion bits of information. But your brain can only consciously handle around about 20 of those bits. So it makes decisions really fast about what to pay attention to and what to throw away. So a blind spot is everything it threw away.

• 1:52Mike Carruthers?

  Also, a simple way to save money on big purchases. And some fascinating things about sidewalks you never knew. For example,

• 2:02Speaker 02

  The very common arrangement in most cities and towns across the country, private property owners are responsible for maintaining, repairing, clearing litter off of the sidewalk, whether or not they own the space.

• 2:17Mike Carruthers?

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• 2:59Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:42Mike Carruthers?

  Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was Something You Should Know. It's the best way to support our show.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Something You Should Know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 4:11Mike Carruthers?

  Have you ever wondered why stores and restaurants play the music that they play? I have. And so that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers, and I'm really glad you're here. So the music playing in a store or restaurant isn't there just to fill the silence. In many cases, it's chosen very carefully because it can influence how you behave. Research has found that slower, softer music encourages shoppers to slow down, browse longer, and often buy more. Faster tempo music does just the opposite. It gets people moving quickly, which is why you often hear upbeat music

• 4:54Mike Carruthers?

  in busy fast food restaurants where rapid table turnover is important. The style of music matters too. Studies have found that customers are more likely to order expensive wine when a restaurant plays classical music than when pop music is playing. Other research suggests that people rate food as more sophisticated or higher quality when the music matches the atmosphere. And diners tend to linger longer when the music is slower and played at a moderate volume. Loud, fast music, on the other hand, encourages people to eat faster and leave sooner. And none of this is accidental. Retailers and restaurants know that music can subtly influence your mood,

• 5:37Mike Carruthers?

  your perception of quality, how quickly you move, how long you stay, and ultimately, how much you're willing to spend. So the next time you're shopping or dining out, listen to the soundtrack. It may have been selected less for your enjoyment than for its ability to quietly shape your decisions. And that is something you should know.

• 6:00Mike Carruthers?

  Every single one of us has blind spots, not just in our vision, in our thinking. In fact, there are things happening around you right now that your brain is completely ignoring. That's not a flaw. It's actually how your brain is designed to work. Every second, you are bombarded by thousands of sights, sounds, smells, sensations, and other bits of information. If your brain tried to process all of it, you'd never get anything done. So it constantly filters out what it decides doesn't matter. For example, until I mentioned it, you probably weren't aware of the feeling of your clothes against your skin or your tongue resting in your mouth.

• 6:44Mike Carruthers?

  Those sensations were all there all along, but your brain simply edited them out. Most of the time, that's incredibly helpful. But sometimes, those same mental blind spots cause us to overlook things that really do matter, important clues, opportunities, mistakes, even obvious problems that are right in front of us. Here to explain why our brains work this way and how understanding these blind spots can help us make better decisions is Kealan Lacer. He is a digital illusionist and one of the world's leading experts on using blind spots to intrigue, baffle, and amaze audiences. Along with the late neuropsychologist David Lewis, he is co-author of a book called "Unseen:

• 7:28Mike Carruthers?

  Blind Spots and Why We Miss What Matters Most." Hi, Kealan. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Hello, Mike. It's lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me onto this wonderful podcast.

• 7:40Mike Carruthers?

  So explain to me and everyone listening, what exactly a blind spot is in your way of thinking?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Imagine that your brain is like the most overworked security guard. There's too much happening around you. So your brain decides what matters most. Every single second, your senses are bombarded with 400 billion bits of information, sights, sounds, smells, everything. But your brain can only consciously handle around about 20 of those bits. So it makes decisions really fast without asking you about what to pay attention to and what to throw away. So a blind spot is everything it threw away, the stuff that was right there in front of you that you completely missed.

• 8:25Mike Carruthers?

  And an example of this in real life would be what?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  So right now, you're listening to me. Your brain is quietly throwing away the feeling of the clothes on your skin, for example, the sounds and things in your peripheral vision, is editing reality in real time without asking for your permission. A blind spot is simply anything that got edited out. And the frightening thing is you never know you missed it because your brain doesn't leave a gap. It just fills in seamlessly. So the most perfect real life example would be, there was an experiment, the famous gorilla experiment, where you're asked to count how many times a basketball passes between basketball players. And a person in a gorilla suit walks through the match, and you missed the gorilla entirely because you're focused on something completely different.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  You're focused on counting basketball passes and not the gorilla walking through because you weren't expecting that. And these weren't distracted people. They were just concentrating, they were concentrating hard. And that's the problem. The harder you focus on one thing, the blind you are for everything else that's around you.

• 9:31Mike Carruthers?

  You know what's interesting about that gorilla thing? Is I've heard that story before, that experiment before, many times. And I always think, well, wait a minute. I wouldn't miss that. If I was watching basketball players passing a basketball and a gorilla walked through the screen that I was watching, I have to believe I would have seen that.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what everyone thinks. And that's precisely why blind spots are so dangerous. Every single person who missed a gorilla thinks the same thing. I'm observant, I pay attention, I wouldn't miss something obvious. And here's the really humbling part. When researchers ran this experiment with trained radiologists, some of the most visually attentive professionals on the planet, and they inserted a tiny gorilla into a CT lung scan. Twenty out of the 24 radiologists missed it completely. While that, because they were actively searching scan for abnormalities, they completely missed the gorilla that was embedded into the CT scan. These people, whose entire career is about not missing things,

• 10:38Speaker 01

  and their brain completely edited out a gorilla in the scan.

• 10:42Mike Carruthers?

  You said a moment ago, you used the phrase, "That's why blind spots are so dangerous." Well, why are they dangerous?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  They're dangerous for many, many reasons. For example, Eastern Airlines, I think it was Flight 401, the entire cockpit crew came fixated on a faulty landing gear. It was a warning light, and it was just one small light, but nobody noticed the autopilot had quietly disengaged. They flew a perfectly functioning plane straight into the Florida Everglades. Everyone was looking, but no one was actually seeing. In medicine, a nurse expected a drug label to read 10 units per milligram. Her brain showed her exactly that. It actually read 10,000 units, and sadly, the patient died.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  And it was not through negligence, it's through blind spots. And we've got so many examples of this, the space shuttle example as well. Operators that had been on 12-hour shifts for three days missed something that caused the space shuttle to ultimately explode. Tragically, seven people died. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant workers at 4:00 a.m. missed a stuck valve that was leaking radioactive material, causing one of the biggest nuclear disasters we've ever had. So fatigue makes blind spots dramatically wider.

• 12:08Mike Carruthers?

  And so knowing that, is there something you can do, understanding that these blind spots exist, that help you see them?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yes, there's many things you can do. Firstly, being aware of them. You can't eliminate your blind spots altogether, but you can absolutely learn when you're most vulnerable, and that changes everything. The honest truth is, trying to eliminate blind spots entirely would be like trying to flapping, sort of try to fly like with flapping your arms. It's baked into how every human brain manages information. But you can work with them. The single most powerful thing you can do is what we call the three Fs. So if you're fatigued, frightened, or furious, your blind spots get dramatically wider in those exact moments. And here's the crucial part. Those are precisely the moments other people want you to make those decisions.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  So if you think about social media is specifically engineered to make you feel frightened or angry, because a frightened or angry person reacts before they think. And that's not by accident, that's a design choice in how social media platforms work. They want you to engage, and the way you engage is by making you furious about things.

• 13:23Mike Carruthers?

  And so how are we manipulated by this? You mentioned social media, but who else is using this against us? To sell us stuff or whatever?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Every company that understands human attention are using these techniques, some innocently, some deliberately, and some in ways that should alarm you. Supermarket is the most universal example. Every crossed-out original price exploits an anchoring bias, for example. Your brain grabs the first number it sees and judges everything against it. The original price is frequently fictitious, or it was there for a very short period of time, and that kind of works every time. Next time a restaurant brings you bread for your food, ask yourself, is that a gift or is it a distraction? So you stop basically bugging the staff for how long the food is taking, and it's a classic distraction technique.

• 14:15Mike Carruthers?

  So what is the blind spot in that example? I mean, to me, that's just a delaying tactic, but, well, I get it. So the blind spot is that when they bring the bread, you stop noticing, you don't notice how much time is passing before your meal gets there, because you've got something to do, you've got something to eat, so you don't see the time passing as quickly. So I'm fascinated by this idea of the example you gave earlier about the airline that crashed because they were not paying attention. And I can understand why some people in that crew might have been blind spotted, but everyone was.

• 14:57Mike Carruthers?

  Everyone had to have bought into whatever everyone else was buying into, almost like it's contagious.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it starts with one person, the captain, noticing the landing gear warning light, and that's legitimate, that matters, and it needs attention, and so you focus on it. But like, here's what happens in a cockpit. It's a deeply hierarchical environment. When a captain focuses on something, the copilot focuses on it too, then the flight engineer. And the social pressure to attend to what a senior person is attending becomes overwhelming. And so crucially, nobody in that cockpit thought that they were neglecting the plane. They all assumed someone else had the controls. That assumption was the blind spot, nobody checked. And so this is what we call a shared blind spot. And they are arguably more dangerous than individual ones,

• 15:49Speaker 01

  because there's nobody left in the room to see what everybody else is missing. And it's the same thing if you think about the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Engineers had raised concerns about the O-rings in cold temperatures. But in a room full of people under pressure to launch with careers and reputation at stake, the group collectively looked away from the warning signs, and ultimately, tragically, seven people died. And this is why we always say diversity is one of the most important tools against blind spots. Different people see different things. A room where everybody thinks the same will have the same identical blind spots, with nobody left to really catch them.

• 16:30Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you're a magician, and I imagine a very interesting way that blind spots are used is in magic. So I want to ask you about that when we come back in just a moment. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call "someday clothes." "I'll wear that someday, that'll fit better someday, someday I'll have a place to wear that." Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility: Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what you don't wear, list it on Vinted.

• 17:15Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:28Mike Carruthers?

  I'm talking with Kealan Lacer. He is author of the book Unseen: Blind Spots and Why We Miss What Matters Most. So, Kealan, if I understand you correctly, probably one of the best uses of blind spots is a magician, where he deliberately is misdirecting and distracting. And I've often thought, you know, I'm smart enough to figure out, if I go see a magician, that I'm going to watch for that, and that I should be able, if I'm consciously trying to figure out where the blind spot is, where the misdirection is, but I can never figure it out. A good magician can even fool people who are looking for it.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  And that's exactly the point. Knowing that misdirection exists does not really protect you from it, not even slightly. And I say that as someone who's spent decades both performing and studying it. When I watch a fellow magician perform a trick that I have performed hundreds of times myself, I can still experience that the illusion, what my perception receives and what my brain receives are two different things, so every single time. Because the blind spot isn't in your knowledge, it's in your architecture of your perception itself. Misdirection doesn't work by hiding things from your eyes. Everything happens in plain sight.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  What it does is exploit the fact that your brain can only consciously follow about four moving objects at once. And a skilled magician simply gives your brain more than four things to process and quietly does the real work, you know, does the real work behind the scenes within that flow.

• 20:08Mike Carruthers?

  Wow. So as a magician, can you, are you able to watch another magician and see what they're doing better than I can, or you're just as susceptible to it as me?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Because I've been doing magic since the age of four, there's very little that would necessarily fool me as a magician. I do still get fooled, and I think most magicians do get fooled. And Penn and Teller, a TV show I've been on twice called Fool Us, literally created the whole concept of the show was about magicians coming on to try and fool them. But I can still be fooled by perceptual optical illusions. For example, the checkerboard illusion, which is a very famous example, where you see basically a checkerboard, like a chess set board, and you see the two colors, the black-gray colors within the checkerboard, and they look completely different colors. But when you cover them over, you see that they are actually the same color, even though

• 21:06Speaker 01

  I've known about that illusion for decades, since I was a child. I'm still fooled by that. My perception is still fooled by that optical illusion. No matter how much I know about it and the science behind it works, my perception still sees those checkerboard colors as different, even though they're exactly the same.

• 21:27Mike Carruthers?

  And I wonder why. I mean, is it just a flaw in the brain? I mean, I've had, in fact, I just saw that online the other day where somebody said, you know, these two squares are the same color. Put your finger in between them and you'll see that they are, but when you pull your finger away, they're not the same color. So it must be just some kind of weird quirk in the brain.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can walk in knowing exactly what's about to happen, and it still works, because you cannot consciously monitor everything simultaneously. So it's not a flaw at all. It's actually one of the most brilliant pieces of engineering in the known universe. It's just become very exploitable. You just described it as a perfect example of that. Your brain isn't making a mistake, it's just doing something extraordinarily sophisticated called color constancy, and it's adjusting to what it shows you based on the surrounding light and context, because in the real world, that's exactly what you need it to do. If your brain just showed you raw, unprocessed visual data, a white piece of paper would look completely different colors, depending on whether you're in sunlight, shade, artificial

• 22:33Speaker 01

  light, et cetera. And your brain corrects for all of that automatically, so you can function in the real world. But the side effect is that sometimes this correction produces an illusion. But I think that's genius, personally.

• 22:47Mike Carruthers?

  Are there people who are not fooled by this, that can look at those things and say, no, those are the same color? They don't see the world the way the rest of us do.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  That's interesting. And no human brain on the planet is immune to these illusions. And I think it's one of the most counterintuitive findings. Intelligence, expertise, experience, none of it really protects you. The visual system operates at a level that's completely inaccessible to conscious thoughts. So when you look at those two squares, your visual cortex has already processed the image and delivered its conclusion to your conscious mind before you've, you know, had a single thought about it. Your rational brain never gets invited to that meeting, so to speak. And it's the same, it's true in magic. I can perform an illusion for a fellow magician who has taught me the same trick, that, you know, they still experience it, it's not because it's about fooling your mind, because

• 23:42Speaker 01

  we're talking about fooling your visual system, and those two things are completely different. What varies between people isn't whether they can be fooled. Everyone is fooled, it's quickly, it's kind of how quickly they recover and question what they've experienced.

• 23:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this seems to cast some doubt on the whole idea of eyewitness testimony, because eyewitnesses, which as I understand it are, you know, if you have eyewitnesses to a crime, that's some pretty solid evidence. And people say, I know what I saw, but what you're saying is, you may not know what you saw.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And eyewitness testimonies is one of the most dangerous blind spots, I think, in our entire justice system. What's happening with those different eyewitness accounts isn't that someone or some people saw clearly and some didn't, it's that every single brain in the crowd was constructing its own version of reality based on its own expectations, emotions, and prior experience. So the crucial thing about memory that most people don't realize is that your brain doesn't record events like a video camera. It reconstructs them afterwards. Every single time you remember something, you're actively rebuilding it, and every rebuild is slightly different.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  A magician called Norman Triplet demonstrated this beautifully, I think in the early 1900s. He performed a vanishing ball trick, and afterwards he asked the audience what they saw, and people described the ball's trajectory through the air in extraordinary detail, but the ball never left his hand. They had reconstructed a memory of something that had never happened.

• 25:25Mike Carruthers?

  How in the world is that possible? If the ball never left his hand, how were people seeing it leave his hand?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Because they are expecting it to leave his hand, and then your brain fills in those snapshots. And I actually proved there's a few examples, video examples, when I toss a coin from one hand to the other, and there's a video example in the book via a QR code. And you can literally see the coin fly from one of my hands to the other hand. You can see it go across. But then I show you from behind, and the coin never goes across. I like about false memories as well. Professor Elizabeth Loftus took this further. She implanted a completely false memory in a 14-year-old boy. She told him he had been lost in a shopping mall aged five, and he hadn't.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  And within days, he was describing the toy store, the bald man who had found him, the blue shirt that he was wearing. It was total fiction, but it felt to the boy completely real. And this is why wrongful convictions built on eyewitness testimonies have sent innocent people to prison for decades. The eyewitness wasn't lying, they probably genuinely believed every word. Their brain had simply edited and reconstructed the scene. And so different people do, as you say, see different things, because different brains have different expectations. And that's why diversity in a jury, in a boardroom, any decision-making group is so genuinely powerful and extremely important.

• 27:03Mike Carruthers?

  And so wrap this up for me. What's the message here? What is it you want people to understand about this, that perhaps we never, because it's not our experience, that we don't understand? Our experience is our truth, and that's what we experience. But what are you trying to get people to see here?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  You think you're seeing reality, but you're not. And the people who know that are actually using it against you. Of the 400 billion bits of information hitting your sense, you know, your senses every second, as I said, your brain consciously processes only about 20 of those. Almost everything is invisible to you by design. Now, the same techniques, distraction, misinformation, priming, forcing, are being used at scale through social media, advertising, politics, AI, often without consent at all, which is a difference between what I do as a magician. I, as a magician, come to a magic show, and I'm deceiving you, but you've consented to it. But these same techniques are often used without people's consent.

• 28:06Mike Carruthers?

  Well, the intriguing thing about blind spots to me is, you know, you don't notice them because they're blind spots. You don't know what you don't notice. And so I appreciate how you've explained it and made us more aware of what blind spots are and what to look out for. I've been talking with Kealan Lacer. He is co-author of the book Unseen: Blind Spots and Why We Miss What Matters Most. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Kealan. Thanks for being here.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 29:38Mike Carruthers?

  Every so often, we kick around ideas for future Something You Should Know episodes, and we ask ourselves, well, what would people find interesting? And I can honestly say that never, not once, has anyone suggested, hey, let's do a segment about sidewalks. I mean, sidewalks? Who would want to hear about sidewalks? Well, as it turns out, you should. Sidewalks are surprisingly fascinating. If there's a sidewalk in front of your house, who actually owns it? Who's responsible for repairing it? If it's public property, can protesters legally stand there and demonstrate in front of your home? Why do some neighborhoods have sidewalks, but others don't?

• 30:23Mike Carruthers?

  And why do sidewalks sometimes just end? It turns out sidewalks are at the center of questions involving property rights, public safety, free speech, city planning, accessibility, and a lot more. Once you start looking at them, you realize sidewalks aren't just places to walk. They're one of the most overlooked and important pieces of public life. Here to explain is Michael Pollack. He is professor of law and associate dean for faculty development at the Benjamin N. Cardoza School of Law in New York City, and he is author of the book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource. Hi, Michael. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 31:09Mike Carruthers?

  So do we know where and when the idea of sidewalks started? It seems like they kind of would just, even if no one invented it, it would kind of develop on its own. But do we have any sense of the earliest sidewalks?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Well, so sidewalks are really ancient concept. There are sidewalks preserved in the ruins of Pompeii. And here in the United States, there were sidewalks in New Orleans when it was a French colony. There were sidewalks in New Amsterdam when it was a British colony, or a Dutch colony, I should say. And so we've had sidewalks for a very long time. They were, sort of as you suggested in your question, they were originally thought of as a resource for that particular home or that particular business. So a person would ride their horse or their carriage up, maybe hitch the horse to a post,

• 32:07Speaker 02

  and then they would be able to get out and step on this raised concrete, or in many cases, it was made out of wood at its original conception, step out onto this wooden sidewalk and not have to stand in the gutter where animal waste was or human waste and water were. And so it was primarily this sort of front door to a home or to a business that was raised out of the messier road. So that was the original idea. It was not really thought of as a thing that was connecting place to place, that was bringing people to one another. And it was certainly not thought of as a place where commerce would take place, where speech and art would take place.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  That happened later as sidewalks began to get connected to one another. And in that connection, my view is, that's where the magic really lies.

• 33:03Mike Carruthers?

  So in the modern day sidewalk world, I'm not sure there is a modern day sidewalk world, but in the modern day sidewalk world, there's a sidewalk in front of my house. Who owns that?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  It's a complicated question. In some communities, it all depends on local law and even the specifics of a person's particular property line in their deed. Sometimes the boundary line of private property ends before you even get to the sidewalk. So it ends at the edge of a person's lawn or at the front of a building. In those circumstances, the sidewalk, just like the road, is owned by the government. It's public property. In other jurisdictions, even other pieces of property, a person's property line might

• 33:57Speaker 02

  actually extend not just to the curb, meaning it includes the sidewalk, sometimes it even goes into the road a little bit. So in those cases, the sidewalk you might think of as sitting on private property. The thing that makes it complicated, though, is that even in those cases, the general public has what we call in property law, an easement, or a right of access to be in that private space. And so to sort of sum it all up, sometimes a sidewalk is public property. Sometimes it's private property with a public right of access. So for us as individuals going about our lives, we don't notice the difference.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  Either way, we have the right to be there, to walk there, to do all sorts of things there. But from the perspective of the private property owner, you might think at least that it would make a difference whether they own the sidewalk or not. It turns out that when it comes to the obligations placed on those private property owners, it actually doesn't make as much of a difference as one would think. They have a whole slew of obligations to maintain the sidewalk whether or not they own it.

• 35:10Mike Carruthers?

  Why? Why? If they don't own it, why is it their responsibility?

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's frankly the thing that got me the most exercised about this, the most upset. The very common arrangement in the, not every city, but most cities and towns across the country, that private property owners are responsible for maintaining, repairing, shoveling, clearing litter off of the sidewalk whether or not they own the space. And you asked why. The answer is because the law says so. Because city and town laws have put that responsibility on private property owners rather than on the city itself. And that's something that I think is all wrong.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  It's wrong not only as a policy choice, and it's wrong not only in terms of the consequences, which are often pretty poor. It's also wrong just as a matter of basic property law. But even in the case where there's private property and that public easement, basic property law would say that the person who enjoys the right of access, in this case, the general public, they're the ones who are supposed to have the obligation to take care of their own right of access, not the owner of the underlying property. So regardless of whether the land is public or private, basic property law would say it's a public responsibility to take care of it.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And yet, we've just consistently, for centuries, made a different choice when it comes to foisting sidewalk management responsibilities onto the adjacent property owner. And again, I think that's a mistake.

• 36:58Mike Carruthers?

  It seems to me there are different kinds of sidewalks, right? There's, you know, like in a residential area, someone's front yard may have a sidewalk in it. That is different to me than, say, the sidewalks on Fifth Avenue in New York, which are big, wide sidewalks that lead to buildings and lead to stores. Are they considered just sidewalks, or are they different?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Well, let me ask you, why do you think they're different?

• 37:28Mike Carruthers?

  Because a residential sidewalk seems like a convenience, whereas the sidewalks on a main street like Fifth Avenue in New York are the only way to get into buildings and stores and shops. They're essential, whereas the sidewalks in a residential area are just a convenience.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  This goes back to what we were talking about before in terms of sort of what is the sidewalk really for. A lot of these laws were rooted in that history where the sidewalk was primarily understood to be an amenity or a feature of a particular building. And so in that version of what a sidewalk is for, it makes a little bit more sense, maybe it makes a lot of sense, to say that's a responsibility of that property owner because the benefit of the sidewalk is for that property owner. That's sort of what I think you're getting at when you talk about accessing that skyscraper with all of the offices and shops and whatnot.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  The thing is, nowadays, the primary function of a sidewalk is not just to get people in and out of a particular building, but to create a coherent network for people to be able to move around an entire city or an entire town. And so it really is a public resource for transportation as well as for, you know, just community gathering, for spending time outdoors with friends and neighbors, some cases for engaging in political action, or speech, or art, or, as I was saying as well, for selling things, you know? We have vendors who operate on the sidewalk.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  We have businesses that, you know, food trucks, for example, that do work on the sidewalk. And so the space is serving all of these functions that is not just for that particular business, that particular building next to the sidewalk. And so because it has all of these public and community functions, it's all the more reason to make it a public and community responsibility. Now, your question about a more suburban or residential neighborhood where there's a single-family home and a lawn and a sidewalk in front of it, it's certainly true that that sidewalk is serving fewer of those functions. But it still serves that critical function of community connectivity, right?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Even in that residential neighborhood, that's how kids are getting from home to school, or at least how they could be getting from home to school if there were safe and consistent sidewalks that connected their neighborhood where they live to where their school is. And so it's essential for them that that sidewalk be safe, well-maintained, cleared of snow, and so on.

• 40:14Mike Carruthers?

  If I have a sidewalk in front of my home, which I do, is it considered public or private property in the sense of if somebody wants to come and protest or do something on the sidewalk, is it public land that they can do that because they can assemble in public? Or is that my private property since I'm responsible for it and I can say, call the police or say, hey, get off my land?

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so one of the difficult things about this system of private responsibility that we have is that it also leads property owners to naturally make the same assumption you just did, right? That because they're responsible for it, they also have rights to control it. And it's generally not true. Now, there are, I said generally, there are exceptions, but for the most part, they have responsibility but no control. So you asked about protest. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees everyone the right to speak freely in what we call public forums.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  And the Supreme Court has held repeatedly that sidewalks are public forums, even when they are sitting on private property. And that's because of that public easement, that public right of access. So people have the right to speak and protest on the sidewalks, to do signature gathering, to campaign for political candidates. They have the right to do those things on public sidewalks. But there's an important asterisk to all of that, which is governments are allowed to impose what we call time, place, and manner restrictions, even in a public forum.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  That's why, for example, even though I might have the right to speak freely on the sidewalk, I might not have the right to do it at 4:00 in the morning at 1,000 decibels with as big a loudspeaker as I might want to have. And so there are questions, frankly, still some open questions in the law about, for example, could a town prohibit protest in a residential neighborhood? What if the entire town was residential neighborhoods? Would that make a difference? Could a town prohibit protest in a commercial neighborhood? Well, that raises a different set of concerns where a lot of times the purpose of a protest

• 42:46Speaker 02

  or a picket in a commercial neighborhood is to disrupt that particular business. Where would the civil rights era have gone if people, for example, could not picket in front of a segregated restaurant or place of business? And so there are different considerations, to be sure, in commercial and residential neighborhoods, and the law respects and understands some of that.

• 43:10Mike Carruthers?

  You used the term a little while ago, consistent sidewalks. And I live in a town that has very inconsistent sidewalks, where you'll be walking down the street and the sidewalk, or down the sidewalk, and the sidewalk just stops. It ends in the middle of the block. And it's, and some streets have no sidewalks. And what determines that?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I think what you're describing is a very common set of circumstances, and one that's very frustrating for folks. It's very frustrating for people trying to get around recreationally. It's particularly frustrating for people trying to get to and from work or school, particularly when those individuals don't have access to a car of their own. So there are a number of layers to how that decision has been made and what the consequences are.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  So sidewalks are generally the choice of the government to either impose or build themselves or to direct property owners to build. Now, that doesn't mean that an individual property owner can't build their own sidewalk on their own property if they want to. Of course, they can. And many of them do. You'll often see in a newer development, they might ring the development with, with a sidewalk that might have been their choice as a property developer to do. But it also might have been that city's choice to force that developer to do so.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  A lot of cities that don't have many sidewalks, what their law says right now is that when a particular parcel of land is redeveloped, that triggers an obligation to install a sidewalk along that parcel. The idea being that, in the long run, all of the parcels on the street would get redeveloped eventually, and eventually the sidewalk network would be all connected. The problem is that, in the meantime, you have these patches of sidewalk and no sidewalk, and you end up with what's often called the sidewalk-to-nowhere problem.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  So it does go back to government decision-making and a lack of thoughtful planning about a whole community's network. And why has that happened? Well, I think the reason that's happened is twofold. One, it's generally been a tendency just to overlook the sidewalk as an important thing, right? We would never think about building streets that didn't connect to each other, or railroad tracks that didn't connect to each other, because that is intuitively a ridiculous thing to do. But we tend, our law, our policymakers, often tend to treat the sidewalk as an afterthought

• 46:08Speaker 02

  or as something that folks can sort of manage with or without. And that's not really true, particularly with people with mobility limitations and other disabilities. And as I was saying, for people who don't have cars of their own, who are therefore reliant on sidewalks and public transportation to get to where they need to get to live their lives on a daily basis.

• 46:33Mike Carruthers?

  What you said was really interesting, that we would never build roads that don't connect to other roads, because there would be absolutely no point to that. And yet we build sidewalks that go nowhere, that start and then stop in the middle of the block, with the policy being, well, over time, the houses will sell and be redeveloped and will make the new owner put in a sidewalk. That could take centuries. I mean, some properties never sell. They stay in families forever. So, I mean, that's just dumb.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  I don't disagree with you. And there are cities that are suspending or waiving that requirement. Houston is, is one of them.

• 47:18Mike Carruthers?

  What do you mean?

• 47:20Speaker 02

  But in the sense that Houston has sort of recognized that they have this persistent sidewalk-to-nowhere problem, and so they have been not enforcing, and in some aspects, waiving the responsibility on property owners to install new sidewalk when a property is redeveloped. So there are communities that are recognizing the, as you were saying, the silliness of that kind of approach. And I, for the, for the record, I agree, that approach is quite silly. What I worry about, though, is that if you don't pursue that approach to building new sidewalks, and you don't replace it with a different approach, well, then there just

• 48:04Speaker 02

  aren't going to be any new sidewalks. And that's also a serious problem. So it goes back to my bigger point, that cities, towns have to step up and develop a plan, an actual coherent, thoughtful plan about where sidewalk needs to be improved, where sidewalks need to be installed, and how it's going to get done cohesively and done with general funds, not individual property owners' own wallets.

• 48:35Mike Carruthers?

  I would imagine that if you talk to a lot of city planner-type people, they will tell you, we got a lot more bigger problems in our town than sidewalks, that in terms of priority, sidewalks is probably not real high if the town has things like, you know, water mains are breaking every week, or, you know, I mean, it, the old infrastructure needs replacing. Sidewalks can wait. I think that's the image that people have.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  To the extent it is, my argument is that that's wrong. Sidewalks are essential, not just for getting people from place to place, but they connect so many other issues of law and policy. In other words, the solutions to a lot of other issues that cities and towns are facing have a sidewalk component. A lot of the city planners that I talk to recognize the importance of sidewalks. And so I think it's less a problem of local officials not paying them enough attention. It's more a problem of everyone else not paying them enough attention, not being willing to put the political pressure on to get the work done.

• 49:47Mike Carruthers?

  Well, if your book had not come across my desk, I would have never thought to think that, you know, we should talk about sidewalks. But, you know, here they are, sidewalks are everywhere, right at our feet, and they affect us in ways that I don't think many people give much thought to until they just heard what you had to say. I've been speaking with Michael Pollack. He is a professor of law at the Benjamin N. Cardoza School of Law in New York City and author of the book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource. There's a link to his book in the show notes. And Michael, thanks for coming on and explaining all this.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a real pleasure.

• 50:28Mike Carruthers?

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• 51:09Mike Carruthers?

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• 51:54Mike Carruthers?

  think would enjoy it. I'm Michael Rutherford. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 52:00Speaker 04

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