Sidewalk in the context of "Cycling infrastructure"

A street is a public thoroughfare in a city, town or village, typically lined with buildings on one or both sides. Streets often include pavements (sidewalks), pedestrian crossings, and sometimes amenities like streetlights or benches. A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable surface such as tarmac, concrete, cobblestone or brick. It can be designed for both social activity and movement.

Originally, the word street simply meant a paved road (Latin: via strata). The word street is still sometimes used informally as a synonym for road, for example in connection with the ancient Watling Street, but city residents and urban planners draw a significant modern distinction: a road's main function is transportation, while streets facilitate public interaction. Examples of streets include pedestrian streets, alleys, and city-centre streets too crowded for motor vehicles to pass. Conversely, highways and motorways are types of roads, but few would refer to them as streets.

A footpath is, in Australian/British/Irish English, a type of thoroughfare, pedestrian way, walking trail, or nature trail, that is intended for use only by pedestrians and not other forms of traffic such as motorized vehicles, bicycles and horses. They can be found in a wide variety of places, from the centre of cities, to farmland, mountain ridges, National parks, nature preserves, conservation areas and other protected wilderness areas. Urban footpaths are usually paved, may have steps, and can be called alleys, lanes, steps, etc.

The term 'footpath' includes pedestrian paths that are next to the road in Irish English, Indian English, Australian English, and New Zealand English (known as pavement in British English and South African English, or sidewalk in North American English).

A public space is a place that is open and accessible to the general public. Roads, pavements, public squares, parks, and beaches are typically considered public space. To a limited extent, government buildings which are open to the public, such as public libraries, are public spaces, although they tend to have restricted areas and greater limits upon use. Although not considered public space, privately owned buildings or property visible from sidewalks and public thoroughfares may affect the public visual landscape, for example, by outdoor advertising. Recently, the concept of shared space has been advanced to enhance the experience of pedestrians in public space jointly used by automobiles and other vehicles.

Public space has also become something of a touchstone for critical theory in relation to philosophy, urban geography, visual art, cultural studies, social studies and urban design. The term 'public space' is also often misconstrued to mean other things such as 'gathering place', which is an element of the larger concept of social space. Public spaces have often been valued as democratic spaces of congregation and political participation, where groups can vocalize their rights.

A combined sewer is a type of gravity sewer with a system of pipes, tunnels, pump stations etc. to transport sewage and urban runoff together to a sewage treatment plant or disposal site. This means that during rain events, the sewage gets diluted, resulting in higher flowrates at the treatment site. Uncontaminated stormwater simply dilutes sewage, but runoff may dissolve or suspend virtually anything it contacts on roofs, streets, and storage yards. As rainfall travels over roofs and the ground, it may pick up various contaminants including soil particles and other sediment, heavy metals, organic compounds, animal waste, and oil and grease. Combined sewers may also receive dry weather drainage from landscape irrigation, construction dewatering, and washing buildings and sidewalks.

Combined sewers can cause serious water pollution problems during combined sewer overflow (CSO) events when combined sewage and surface runoff flows exceed the capacity of the sewage treatment plant, or of the maximum flow rate of the system which transmits the combined sources. In instances where exceptionally high surface runoff occurs (such as large rainstorms), the load on individual tributary branches of the sewer system may cause a back-up to a point where raw sewage flows out of input sources such as toilets, causing inhabited buildings to be flooded with a toxic sewage-runoff mixture, incurring costs for cleanup and repair. When combined sewer systems experience these higher than normal throughputs, relief systems cause discharges containing human and industrial waste to flow into rivers, streams, or other bodies of water. Such events frequently cause both negative environmental and lifestyle consequences, including beach closures, contaminated shellfish unsafe for consumption, and contamination of drinking water sources, rendering them temporarily unsafe for drinking and requiring boiling before uses such as bathing or washing dishes.

A pedestrian is a person traveling on foot, by wheelchair or with other mobility aids. Streets and roads often have a designated footpath for pedestrian traffic, called the sidewalk in North American English, the pavement in British English, and the footpath in Australian, Indian and New Zealand English. There are also footpaths not associated with thoroughfares; these include rural paths and urban short cuts.

Historically, walking has been the main way people get around. In the early use of the word, pedestrian meant a "professional walker", or somebody who held a record for speed or endurance. With the advent of cars, it started to be used as an opposite: somebody who is not riding or driving.

In urban planning and urban design, a city block, residential block, urban block, houseblock, or simply block is the smallest group of buildings that is surrounded by streets. City blocks are the space for buildings within the street pattern of a city, and form the basic unit of a city's urban fabric. City blocks may be subdivided into any number of smaller land lots usually in private ownership, though in some cases, it may be other forms of tenure. City blocks are usually built-up to varying degrees and thus form the physical containers, or "streetwalls," of public spaces. Most cities are composed of a greater or lesser variety of sizes and shapes of an urban block. For example, many pre-industrial cores of cities in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East tend to have irregularly shaped street patterns and urban blocks, while cities based on grids have much more regular arrangements.

By extension, the word "block" is an important informal unit of length equal to the distance between two streets of a street grid.

A curb (American English) or kerb (British English) is the edge where a raised sidewalk/pavement or road median/central reservation meets a street/other roadway.