Incomplete streets

Lansing is the hub of a unique web of bike and pedestrian trails that take users from the heart of downtown to gorgeous natural areas many miles away, with only a handful of at-grade crossings.

Back on the streets, however, efforts to make the city more bikeable and walkable have been fitful and spotty in recent years.

Although the city adopted a Complete Streets ordinance in 2009, with grand plans for multiple paths crisscrossing the city, only a part of the plan has come to fruition.

What’s more, some of the road projects that have been completed or are in progress, including stretches of Aurelius Road and Michigan Avenue, are making things even worse for bicyclists.

Other long-term issues, like the gravelly, crumbling and dangerous bike lanes along heavily used Kalamazoo Street, still await resolution.

Nick Kwiatkowski is a founding member of Strong Towns Lansing, an advocacy group formed in 2024 that’s active on a range of issues facing cities, from housing to transportation, with a strong emphasis on making streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

Strong Towns advocates were a key part of the coalition that successfully lobbied the Michigan Department of Transportation to adjust its work schedule on the rebuilding of U.S. 127 and keep the eastern stretch of the Lansing River Trail open this summer after it was closed for all of summer 2024.

Raymond Holt for City Pulse Protected bike lanes have been temporarily installed along some MSU campus routes. The local biking community asked the city of Lansing to include protected bike lanes along the newly renovated Michigan Avenue, but they weren’t included in the final design.

Raymond Holt

Kwiatkowski called the River Trail a “gem,” but he added that off the trail, “the city has been lacking in providing safe cycling paths across the community.”

A case in point is the 2022 rebuilding of Aurelius Road from the Interstate 496 overpass to Mount Hope Avenue.

On this stretch, bicyclists enjoy new, smooth bike lanes that unaccountably shrink from 12 feet wide to 6 feet to nothing.

“It disappears,” Kwiatkowski said. “It’s about as bad a situation as you can get.”

The bike lanes on Kalamazoo Street, a corridor heavily used by bike commuters, are a war zone of potholes, loose gravel and debris with zero buffering between bikers and automobiles.

“Yet the city promotes this as one of the great paths across the city, and it just isn’t,” Kwiatkowski said.

The most high-profile point of contention between bike advocates and the city is the ongoing makeover of Michigan Avenue.

The final design shunts bikers onto an extra-wide sidewalk well off the roadway.

“We worked closely with the city of Lansing on the redesign of Michigan Avenue,” Kwiatkowski said. “Unfortunately, the design that ended up coming out of that at the last minute wasn’t really what we asked for.”

Numerous studies have found that riding on the sidewalk is more dangerous than riding on the road — up to five times more dangerous, depending on the study.

The Michigan Avenue path, like any urban sidewalk, crosses dozens of driveways and cross streets. Each crossing is a potential point of contact where motorists are pulling out of lots or garages, watching road traffic as they make turns, and often not expecting — or looking for — cross traffic coming from the sidewalk.

Tim Potter is the sustainable transportation manager at the Michigan State University Bikes Service Center. He said that after a series of open houses and other public meetings, the biking community settled on a design that included protected bike lanes.

“It was beautiful and would have been the first ones of its kind in mid-Michigan,” Potter said. “We went back and forth, spent hours on it, and then we got down to it, and they just basically did a sidewalk beautification. They said, ‘We don’t have the money.’ And that was it.”

Andy Kilpatrick, Lansing’s public service director, said the design was the result of input from bicyclists.

“Bicyclists didn’t want to be directly next to traffic or parked vehicles,” Kilpatrick said.

Adding bike lanes at street level, he explained, would have limited on-street parking.

“The benefit of this design is that it is separated from both traffic and parking,” he said. “It’s adjacent to the sidewalk, so there’s increased interaction between bikes and pedestrians. We need to make sure there’s a visual indication of the separation between the two facilities with both signs and striping.”

Kilpatrick said both the unused design with the on-street, buffered bike lanes and the adopted design take up 17 feet of width, but the unused design would have only left room for a 4-foot-wide sidewalk.

In an October 2024 interview with City Pulse, Kilpatrick left the door open to adding separated, fully buffered, street-adjacent bike lanes to Michigan Avenue in 2026 or later if traffic levels allow for reducing the roadway by a lane and finances permit.

If and when the discussion reopens on the design of Michigan Avenue, Kwiatkowski and Strong Towns Lansing will be in the mix.

In the meantime, Strong Towns is working with the city on making future road projects, including the rebuilding of parts of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, more bike- and pedestrian-friendly.

Kwiatkowski said he’s also working with the city as it develops connections from the River Trail to neighboring communities.

“The city has been doing a great job improving and maintaining the Lansing River Trail, not just as a recreational path, but to connect different parts of the city to allow people to use it to get where they need to go,” he said.

He said the recently completed Bear Lake Trail not only added some beautiful miles to the system but “picked up a large population area that was underserved in the city itself.”

People who are interested in joining Strong Towns can check out its website or its primary virtual home, the Discord group.

“We have members from teenagers to retirees,” Kwiatkowski said. “We even have folks who are running for some city offices as well, so we’re hoping that gives us some political influence when we start making these larger asks of the city.”