Like many folks who had been cooped up at home at the start of the pandemic, I got in the habit of taking long walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood. I told myself it was enough exercise to justify all the comfort eating, as well as an opportunity to support local businesses and cure my cabin fever.
Over time, I started paying attention to—really noticing—the space I was using: the sidewalk. And the more I paid attention to the sidewalk, the more I saw.
I saw outdoor restaurant dining and I saw food vendors. I saw scooters and bike shares. I saw trash bags and debris and snow—and I shoveled some of it too. I saw scaffolding and COVID testing tents. I saw lemonade stands and unclaimed pet waste, neighbors gathering to chat and people experiencing homelessness. I saw festivals, parades, and protests. I saw nearly every facet of human existence—what Jane Jacobs famously called the “sidewalk ballet”—play out, for better or worse, on this small strip of concrete.
And when I started leaving my neighborhood again, I kept on seeing it play out on the sidewalks of big cities and small towns across the country.
But everywhere I went, I also saw competition and conflict. Residents complain about the people, noise, clutter, and rodents that sidewalk dining attracts. Pedestrians, especially people who use devices like wheelchairs and walkers, have to navigate spaces made narrower and more crowded by tables and chairs. Bags of trash put out for collection create the same obstacles for pedestrians, and they also threaten the ambience of outdoor dining. Sidewalk vendors represent competition for brick-and-mortar businesses. Sidewalk trees provide shade and oxygen and help with stormwater absorption, but they drop fruit and leaves and damage the sidewalk with roots that buckle the pavement. Unshoveled snow and ice is a threat to every user of the sidewalk. All those festivals and protests raise a whole range of challenges for nearby businesses and residents. Indeed, in the case of protests, those challenges are often precisely the purpose. I could go on and on.
Little is being done to effectively address those conflicts, and the reality is that it is unclear who bears the responsibility to take action. We have taken our sidewalks for granted. And if we don’t find new ways to manage the space, there is a real risk that the quality and utility of our cities’ walkways will collapse.
How can cities stop that from happening? By establishing a Department of Sidewalks.
Sidewalk conflict isn’t new. Competition for space has always been fierce. More than that, our history has been marked by quite serious versions of sidewalk conflict, many of which persist. For generations, so-called respectable women were expected not to walk the sidewalks alone. But as women entered the workforce and used public sidewalks more freely, those sidewalks became a space for feminist empowerment and social change. Even so, many women continue to be made to feel unsafe on sidewalks.
The record is even starker when it comes to race. White pedestrians historically used the sidewalks to enforce social status, forcing Black pedestrians to the less clean and more dangerous gutter and roadway. In 1883 a dispute over racial dominance on a sidewalk in Danville, Virginia, ultimately led to a white mob shooting into a crowd of unarmed Black men, women, and children; at least five people were killed in the Danville Riot. And in 2014, it was on a city sidewalk where NYPD officers killed Eric Garner while arresting him for selling loose cigarettes.
But sidewalk conflict is getting more wide-ranging. This isn’t because we’re worse at getting along with one another, but because we’re making more and more varied use of very limited space. Many businesses have made pandemic-era sidewalk dining permanent. E-bike-riding delivery drivers zoom up and down sidewalks. There are scooter- and bike-share companies like Lime and Bird that turn sidewalks into their own storage space. There are battery-powered mobile convenience store kiosks developed by startups like Blank Street and Tortoise to amble down sidewalks selling cookies. There are curbside electric vehicle charging stations and package delivery lockers. And there are even autonomous delivery robots operated by FedEx, Amazon, and others. Again, I could keep going.
None of these new uses is necessarily a bad thing. Many of them likely represent valuable opportunities to make life better. But Americans have never been very good at managing our sidewalks. Throughout the country, our sidewalks are regulated by a complicated web of private landowners and an alphabet soup of municipal agencies. This slicing and dicing of responsibility and accountability has not only failed to manage the space—it has affirmatively made matters worse, and it threatens to continue doing so if we don’t fix it.
Take the private side first. It was only in the early 1900s that municipalities even started to pay for sidewalk construction. Before then, it was all paid for by the owners of adjacent property. But even once municipalities took responsibility for building sidewalks, those owners of adjacent lots were left with much of the responsibility of maintaining them.
These responsibilities persist today. For example, owners have to keep the sidewalks clear. That means shoveling snow and clearing ice, and, as Taylor Swift reportedly learned all too well recently, it means removing refuse and obstructions from the slice of the public sidewalk in front of one’s lot. It also means installing, repaving, and repairing the sidewalk concrete whenever necessary—often at the owner’s expense. These costs can pile up into the thousands of dollars, and an owner’s failure to pay their sidewalk repair bill could even lead to foreclosure.
This outsourcing of governmental responsibility is unique. It is hard to imagine a modern municipality requiring adjacent owners to plow the snow—or, better yet, to repave the part of the street directly in front of their property. Public parks need maintaining too, but we do not generally require those who live near the park to take turns mowing the grass or picking up trash.
More than imposing a burden on owners, though, this privatization is one of the main reasons why the sidewalks are poorly managed. First, it is a large part of why less wealthy neighborhoods have lower-quality sidewalks. What should be public services provided equally to all has turned into private services dependent on a community’s ability to provide them.
Second, privatization tangles the lines of public oversight and accountability. And it directs tax dollars to inefficient enforcement instead of effective problem-solving. Indeed, even when the people and businesses in the community have the resources, they tend to devote the bare minimum to the sidewalks—often not because they are malicious but because they have little incentive to do any better.
And third, privatization contributes to territorial behavior and feelings of power and control, and thus sharpens the conflicts for sidewalk space.
Then there’s the government’s current role. Nearly every aspect of sidewalk life that hasn’t been put in the hands of individuals is assigned to its own municipal agency. This fragmentation makes it extremely difficult for municipalities to coherently and effectively govern the diversity of the sidewalk’s functions. It also creates real challenges for owners and businesses trying to make use of the space. Departments of transportation, buildings, parks, sanitation, police, fire, consumer affairs, health, culture, and more all share pieces of the puzzle. And when they regulate or issue permits, they are not positioned well to consider the impacts outside their specific mission and expertise.
They not only fail to resolve many of the conflicts, but they create more of their own. In big cities, it’s not uncommon to encounter stretches of sidewalk that have been effectively eliminated by an entirely disconnected combination of scaffolding, bike racks, trash placement, cafe tables, and street lamps. Pedestrians are left stranded, businesses suffer, and the residents of apartments must navigate dark mazes to get into and out of their buildings.
Sidewalk chaos isn’t intentional. It happens because no one is empowered with the wide-angle lens necessary to cohesively see and address all of the sidewalk’s users and functions. In a forthcoming article in the Michigan Law Review, I argue that what our cities need are therefore local departments of sidewalks—the choreographers for Jacobs’ sidewalk ballet.
Local departments of sidewalks would shift power and financial costs away from adjacent property owners, restoring efficient, equitable, and accountable maintenance. And they would consolidate all the functions currently scattered across agencies, creating more coherent and navigable regulation.
So, rather than spending taxpayer dollars to essentially send a city employee to point at a sidewalk problem and tell an individual owner to fix it, the municipality could spend that money to pay that same employee to do the job themself. Take snow, for example. Individual property owners have no reason to invest in anything more than a shovel given the relatively small scale of their own operations. But a municipality with its much larger scale could reasonably invest in more efficient, motorized sidewalk snowplows.
Moreover, the people and businesses who suffer due to poorly maintained sidewalks currently have no direct path to address those problems. Rather, they have to convince the municipality to prod a neighbor into fixing the problem—a neighbor whom they can’t vote out of office or punish themselves. Putting the city in charge instead would enable people to get help and attention from the same government that has the political incentives and the power to actually do something about the problem. Finally, delinking the responsibility for sidewalks from the wallets of the people who live near them could improve the quality of those spaces and make for more equitably safe and healthy communities.
This logic is already taking hold in a number of cities around the country. In a voter referendum in November 2022, the people of the city of Denver voted to impose on themselves a small monthly fee to fund municipal sidewalk maintenance. Chicagoans have been gathering signatures demanding that the city of Chicago take responsibility for removing sidewalk snow and ice, and New York City Council member Tiffany Cabán has called for similar change in her city. To be sure, it would come at a cost—and some in Minneapolis, for example, appear to be balking at the projected price tag—but it is critical to remember that taxpayers are spending this money on their own already. What’s more, they’re doing it inefficiently and, at the end of the day, still leaving vulnerable populations facing mobility limitations.
Going further, a local Department of Sidewalks could also exercise coordinated authority over all the diverse facets of sidewalk life in a way that would make governance and permitting much simpler. Moreover, it would eliminate the game of political hot potato and put in place a single identifiable commissioner who would be responsible and accountable for the state of the sidewalks.
Many municipalities are taking steps in this direction too, whether with interagency working groups or, as in New York City, a “public realm” czar. These are very good developments. But not all types of public spaces are the same—parks are quite different from sidewalks, for example—so more durable, sidewalk-specific attention is necessary.
Departments of sidewalks would not solve every problem, and they would still need to work with other municipal agencies and with people and businesses, just like any agency does. But by giving sidewalks a dedicated regulator and custodian, a local Department of Sidewalks would be able to provide these arteries, and the slew of interests that rely on them, with the attention and respect they need. Until that happens, they’ll just be walked all over.
