This absolutely makes no sense. North america suburbs and neighbors that have no sidewalks are generally low volume and low speed streets. These are "community areas" IMO and should have a pedestrian orientation first and foremost.

On these types of neighborhood streets pedestrian are and should be more then allowed to utilize the street either as a pedestrian walking or a pedestrian on a bike.

As a individual in a car when you drive through a neighbourhood street you should adjust you driving as if there are a bunch of children potentially on the street.

I find the trouble is in north america is we don't classify our roadways well and definitely don't differentiate well between a street, a road, a high speed road, and a highway.

This is why we get this weird over-engineering of suburban streets that look like roads where people want to drive at high speeds inside the suburb. And then at the exact same time we get roads (that should have been roads) that are a weird merging between a road and a street (a stroad) all around cities.