Let’s say you drive over a pothole in front of your house in Denver and call the city. They come fix it within a few days. Problem solved.

Now let’s say the problem is the sidewalk in front of your house. You call the city again.

Until recently, city staff would have pointed you to their “Homeowner’s Do-It Yourself Guide for Hazardous Sidewalks,” where it clearly states that “sidewalk maintenance is the responsibility of the adjacent property owner.” This online document then suggests that if you need to remove a tripping hazard from your sidewalk, you could rent a “Masonry Rotary Grinder” from your local rental center.

Be sure to also get yourself some eye protection.

In most U.S. cities, a pothole is treated as a public problem, but a broken sidewalk – even one that blocks access – is treated as the homeowner’s problem.

It is not this way everywhere. In some older U.S. cities such as Boston and Washington, sidewalks have long been a public responsibility – the same as streets, water lines and sewers. But cities that grew up in a different era – or cities eager to offload maintenance and legal responsibility – treated sidewalks not as fundamental infrastructure but as an amenity tied to adjacent property.

More than three-quarters of the 30 most-populous U.S. cities take that same approach.

But not Denver – at least, not anymore. In 2022, the city changed its rules, not because city leaders suddenly changed course, but because advocates such as Jill Locantore and the Denver Streets Partnership got tired of waiting, organized and took the issue to the ballot. Denver allows citizens to initiate legislation, and the measure won handily, making sidewalks a public responsibility.

Denver’s sidewalk data

Denver ended up with a citywide sidewalk program funded through a fee on property owners, typically $150 per household per year, and managed by the city. Instead of trying to get individual homeowners to fix bad sidewalks one segment at a time, Denver now has a system – and funding it can bond against – to repair, build and maintain sidewalks as a connected public network.

Los Angeles underscores the contradiction. The law there still says adjacent property owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance; yet, the city also runs a public repair program for larger sidewalk projects after years of ADA litigation made clear that this is not just a private matter.

But most cities don’t even know which sidewalks need fixing.

When I first took my job at the University of Colorado Denver in 2009, I taught an Introduction to GIS course, where students learned how to use digital maps to understand real-world problems. In prepping for that class, I dug into the city’s data and came away impressed by the fact that they had a sidewalk layer, basically a digital map of the city’s sidewalks. However, unlike nearly every other GIS dataset the city provided, the sidewalk one hadn’t been updated since 2004. The logic seemed to be that not seeing the problem protects you from liability. But sticking your head in the sand is not much of a long-term strategy.

Sidewalk safety, a tale of two cities

There is no such hesitancy with cities collecting roadway data. In one study, my colleagues and I interviewed staff from 16 U.S. cities about the information they track on their roads. One city told us that they had “no gaps in data and don’t need anything else.” Most others likely would’ve agreed with that sentiment.

We then asked the same questions about their sidewalk data. The tone of the responses shifted quickly. Audible frustration and an early disclaimer of “it’s complicated” were common. They told us that sidewalks just weren’t given the same priority as roads.

Why would they be? Or better yet, why should they be?

One reason is road safety.

Hoboken, New Jersey, has become the U.S. poster child for safe streets. Experts point to the success of interventions like curb extensions, high-visibility crosswalks, protected bike lanes and lowering the citywide speed limit.

But before all of that, Hoboken undertook a systematic effort to catalog its sidewalks and their condition. The city runs an annual sidewalk inspection program where trained volunteers walk the sidewalks and record problems. Hoboken also developed a smartphone app so the inventory could be digitized instantly, including not just sidewalk defects but also things like burned-out pedestrian lights and damaged pedestrian signals.

Hoboken remains one of the many cities that put the onus to fix sidewalks onto adjacent property owners. But you can probably get away with that when your nickname is the “Mile Square City” and your median income is more than twice the national average.

But nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality? In a city of nearly 60,000 residents and a daytime population of over 90,000? Hoboken must be doing something right, and focusing on sidewalks first may be part of it.

Springfield, Ohio, also has nearly 60,000 residents. Yet the city suffered more than 50 road fatalities over the past nine years. The list of contributing factors is long, but sidewalks matter.

In fact, in Springfield’s 2024 community survey, residents cited the condition of sidewalks and streets as the city’s worst problem. Over 90% of residents said they were dissatisfied with them.

To its credit, Springfield is looking to fix its sidewalks. And to be fair, doing so is much harder when your city is spread across 26 square miles (67 square kilometers) of land instead of one.

But giving property owners just 30 days to fix their own sidewalks? And adding the repair costs to their property tax bill if they don’t? There has to be a better way. I’m guessing that the residents along the 22 streets that recently received such notices would agree.

I live in Denver. The sidewalk in front of my house had some lips and dips that could’ve compelled me to rent heavy equipment and get to work. But the city came out and replaced it. Without my even asking.

So if you want to take a lesson from Denver, making sidewalks a public responsibility is possible. It can even be popular. And if you want to take a lesson from Hoboken and make your city safer, start with the humble sidewalk. Figure out where they are, and where they are not. Where they need to be repaired, and where they need to be replaced.

In other words, sidewalks come first.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Wes Marshall, PhD, PE, receives funding from entities such as the Colorado Department of Transportation and the University Transportation Center program.