Sidewalks and Paths in Reston II

This is an add-on to my previous post.  Took a walk down Freetown yesterday.  It's an area of single-family homes on both sides of the road, with a sidewalk on one side. Most of the homeowners had cleared their portion of the sidewalk so I only had to walk in the road a couple places.  It gives another perspective on paths and sidewalks. 

Presumably, in the beginning there were cities and country. Cities, and only cities, had sidewalks.  And sidewalks were on the land of, or bordered the land of, owners of private property. So there was a neat division: owners cleared their walks, the city cleared their streets.  Meanwhile in the country the county plowed the roads.

Then we come to the mid-20th century with property developments and planned towns.  And road were separated from the private property owners.  So you begin to have "orphan sidewalks", where the old rule that the property owner was responsible didn't and couldn't work. And thus you have the pattern of Reston, where Reston Association clears its paths, VDOT clears its streets, and the sidewalks (which may be on Reston property or on VDOT right-of-way, I'm not sure but both are possible) go uncleared.