Fix the damn sidewalks: Lansing’s are as bad as the roads

(This story has been updated to correct an editing error. An earlier version referred to Zelith Zaneta by the wrong pronoun. City Pulse apologizes for the error.)

One minute, Linda Gonzales was enjoying a beautiful Saturday in June as she walked to a mailbox along Jolly Road in south Lansing. The next, she was on the ground with a broken wrist.

The culprit was a mismatched sidewalk slab raised around 3 inches high relative to the next. It left her on the ground for around five minutes, her wrist broken and knees scraped, before she was able to get up and seek medical help.

Gonzales, who moved to Lansing around three months ago from Walker, was unaccustomed to the state of Lansing’s sidewalks. Out of nearly 600 miles them, many sections “are very old and have shifted due to a number of factors,” mayoral spokesperson Scott Bean said.

Lansing’s sidewalks pose a range of hazards to pedestrians. From left to right: A cracked sidewalk on the 200 block of Fairview Avenue on the east side leads to a slanted and mismatched sidewalk. The pink paint indicates the city has looked at the sidewalk. A cracked sidewalk on the 1200 block of Vermont Avenue in North Lansing is heavily slanted to one side, making it difficult for manual …

Fixing those sections has been a priority for City Council President Ryan Kost, who said that the city’s sidewalk budget has continued to increase since he joined the Council. But even the new sidewalk budget of $1 million, up from $575,000 in the 2023-‘24 fiscal year, falls well short of the estimated $12 million Kost said is needed yearly.

“It’s still not enough,” he said. “And unfortunately, none of the road money can be used for sidewalks. It can only be used for the ramp entryways to sidewalks from the road.”

In the meantime, current conditions present not just trip hazards for ordinary people like Gonzales but unnavigable situations for wheelchair and cane users.

Tamara Reid Bush is an engineering professor at MSU who studies biomechanics. She works frequently with older adults and people with mobility issues and has studied the difficulties sidewalks can pose.

She said mismatched sidewalks, like the one Gonzales tripped over, pose an additional threat to wheelchair users. They can cause “a tipping action that occurs as the chair abruptly stops due to hitting that elevated section.”

“We’ve heard of some situations where a person is pushing a loved one in a wheelchair, and the wheel catches on this mismatch, and the person falls out of the wheelchair,” she said.

Another common issue is an angled sidewalk, or one that is not level for a long stretch. Such a sidewalk requires not only balance but more force to move a manual wheelchair.

A “huge problem” in Michigan, she said, are “cracks or potholes” at the bottom of curb cut-outs, where wheelchairs, walkers and knee scooters can get stuck. Often situated at the bottom of a ramp, these potholes can put pedestrians in danger from cars.

Zelith Zaneta, an ambulatory wheelchair user who interns downtown, said the sidewalks were difficult to navigate with a wheelchair or cane. Alongside slanted sidewalks, “big divots” in the sidewalk itself make navigation difficult.

“Even if I’m using my cane, it can get stuck in those divots,” Zaneta said.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 includes specifications that must be met by sidewalks built or altered after Jan. 26, 1992. Those specifications include provisions that changes in level cannot be greater than a quarter inch, for instance, or half an inch if beveled with a slope.

But actually complying with the ADA can be impossibly expensive. In Los Angeles, for instance, a class-action lawsuit on behalf of disabled residents triggered a nearly $1.37 billion repair program to fix the city’s sidewalks in 2016. A 2021 report from the L.A. City Controller’s Office found less than 1 percent of the city’s sidewalks had been issued certificates of compliance in five years.

It is unclear what the consequence of a similar lawsuit would be in Lansing. Attempts to reach public service director Andy Kilpatrick for comment were unsuccessful. But it is clear that the disparity between the current budget and the needs of disabled residents has no immediate solution.

users to navigate. A missing sidewalk slab on Kalamazoo Street, opposite Hunter Park, could cause mobility problems for wheelchair, walker and cane users, especially during rainy weather. A pothole on the ramp leading to the road at the intersection of Holmes Street and Larned Street could lead a wheelchair or walker user to get stuck or fall.

Kost said the bind could be at least partially alleviated if municipalities were allowed to spend funding for roads on repairing sidewalks. He said creating ADA-accessible ramps from roads to sidewalks had been a priority because the city can spend road funding on those ramps.

“I think another broken part of the state process is how road money is divided up, and I think the state would be smart to focus on not only roads, but sidewalks too,” he said.

“There are communities that can put 8-foot-wide sidewalks in the whole community because they have a massive tax base without a lot of cost,” he continued. “And then there’s aging urban areas that simply do not have a big enough tax base to support it.”

One solution the city has been using is having citizens report trip hazards on the city’s app, Lansing Connect. Kost said he used the app himself, to mixed results.

“I use it and I report sidewalks, and sometimes it’s quick, and sometimes I have to remind them,” he said. “Typically, you’ll see spray-paint on sidewalks that they’ve come out and looked at, and then the work will go on from there.”

“Unfortunately, some of those get lost in translation, so my hope is that as we move forward and sidewalks become a bigger issue, that we will address those a little faster.”

Another issue with the app is that residents are unaware of its existence. Both Gonzales and Zaneta said they had never heard of it.

“If I had known about that app, I would have got on it right away and sent pictures,” Gonzales said. “This is not the only sidewalk to report. There is uneven sidewalk everywhere.”

“I had no clue the app exists, and I follow a lot of the city’s social media,” Zaneta said.

Kost said he expects sidewalks and other deteriorating infrastructure to be both a continued problem and priority as time goes on.

Leo V. Kaplan/City Pulse The mismatched sidewalk that tripped Linda Gonzales, near the intersection of Jolly Road and Waverly Road in South Lansing. The elevation is around 3 inches.

“It doesn’t seem like a bunch, but in my three years on Council, we’ve doubled how much sidewalk repair money there is, and we’ll continue to find that money every year,” he said.

“When you see those increases on property taxes, that’s where we need to be investing that money: into our neighborhood infrastructure. Folks want to know what they’re getting when they’re paying these taxes, you know, what their return on investment is, and we need to start showing results.”