I live in a city that explicitly allows cyclists to bike on sidewalks, and I'd never bike otherwise. One time I tried road-riding the mere 15m home from the gym and had 3 close calls from drivers. We also have separate, protected paths at the road level. Anybody who wants me to ride on the road can send me a blank check to cover medical expenses in the case of an accident if they are so invested in my riding according to their preferences.

Luckily it's illegal to ride a bicycle on sidewalks in my country and yet many people do it at half the speed and half the comfort of what they would have on the road (sidewalks are not maintained to be smooth and are cluttered by all sort of things and people.) I'm a cyclist and I really hate them. If they are afraid to ride on the road, it sucks for them but it's only one of the things people would like to do and cannot do. Walk, catch a bus, drive a car.

Besides Europe, I remember seeing several sidewalks in Japan that allowed it. And many (most?) streets in Japan are fully mixed across modes, and have no sidewalk, so you'll see bikers+pedestrians(+cars) combined there too.

There's something very nice about these types of mixed streets, but they're pretty much unheard in the US. They work very well on small residential streets, where cars would otherwise get 80% of the street width reserved to their use, even where car traffic is low.

Also, US sidewalks tend to be extremely narrow, which makes it worse to share modes.

It's technically illegal to ride your bike on the sidewalk in at least Tokyo. The lack of protected bike lanes, however, means that very few people obey that law.

There's a lot of mixed-use streets here without sidewalks, and if cars weren't allowed on them, they'd be great. I'm always worried about being hit by a car on them.

Tons of sidewalks in Tokyo are marked for mixed use. You'll see these round blue signs showing both a bicycle and pedestrian

https://i.imgur.com/OzShuC8.jpg

I wouldn't generally call Tokyo a bike friendly city but they do have bike parking lots and more and more bike lanes are being added.

In Japan, you definitely see bikes going fairly quickly on sidewalks where there is a fair bit of pedestrian traffic. I'm especially careful in Japan to not make any possibly unpredictable side to side moves when walking because that's a good way to get clipped.

I've even seen bikes trying to make their way through a pedestrian crush that's basically the people density of Times Square in NYC.

> Do some cities actually let cyclists bike on sidewalks?

Not sidewalks per se, but combined, mixed-used paths are very common. Whether this is a good idea or not is another issue.

Sidewalks let you fill in gaps in the protected path network by riding slowly.

In my city at least you can't really go fast on the sidewalks even if they're empty (lots of uneven brick, chunky curbs, trees, buildings have stoops, etc) so it's not a big issue. If someone has to go a couple blocks on the sidewalk they'll generally get back on the path / road as soon as able

In DC it's specifically allowed except for a prohibited section near the Mall downtown. And in that section the law is widely ignored by both cyclists and police either way.

Yes. Several cities in the Bay Area have shared sidewalks; e.g. Embarcadero in San Francisco, and Foster City has a ton of them. I don't know of any cities that allow all sidewalks to be used by bikes, but I'm sure some exist.

Embarcadero's a special case since it's so wide, and barely has car traffic crossing it. (It borders the ocean on one side.) San Francisco has many protected bike lanes and if your route is on those exclusively, it's very nice.

Definitely, quite common on European cities.

Does it matter if it is not enforced?