East Lansing — The greatest asset of the Lansing metro area is the Lansing River Trail, a beautiful system of walking and bicycling trails that runs over 20 miles along several waterways in the city. It connects Michigan State University to downtown Lansing. It has wetlands and beautiful forests, abundant wildlife (I saw nine deer taking photos for this), and, when the weather is nice, I bike parts of it almost every day. It should be a place everyone in the community can enjoy safely.
We are foolish, therefore, to let it decay to crime, but that is what’s happening now. Over the past few months, there has been a surge in graffiti, theft, littering, scary characters behaving in aggressive ways, and homeless encampments, some of which appear to be basically permanent.
I’ve talked with other city residents who tell me that, when they were kids, they used to bike the trail by themselves—but never would they let their children do that now, and they use it less themselves out of the same concerns. My own daughter has told me she doesn’t like biking the trail (even with me) where it goes through downtown Lansing, because of all the “scary people.” Like many other cities across America right now, Lansing has apparently decided that we’re okay with the degradation of our public spaces. That’s a choice, and a foolish one.
A few days ago my wife’s bicycle was stolen from our driveway in East Lansing. The thief actually stole an e-bike, but did not steal the charger, so I figured he might ride it until the battery died. Without the battery, it becomes a super-heavy manual bike, and I figured he might just abandon it. So I decided to bike the trail system from East Lansing through downtown Lansing to look for a bicycle left by the wayside.
I didn’t find it. But just on this one trip, I had a series of disturbing encounters. Most seriously, I had to
deal with an aggressive man in downtown Lansing who was behaving oddly and asking me strange
questions about my own bicycle, and generally setting off my “this is a potentially dangerous situation” intuition when I stopped to look at a map.
When I decided to bike off and get around him (way off in the grass, mind you), he tried to block me. I kept going anyway, and he yelled something after me. That was alarming. I’m a man on a bicycle, which offers me a good amount of protection here. What if you’re a young woman out jogging alone and have an encounter like that, or a mother pushing children in a stroller? You would probably resolve never to use the trail again.
On this same trip, I also observed what I think was a bike theft in progress and found a brand-new homeless camp right next to the trail nearer to MSU.
What needs to happen? First, we need to clean off the graffiti on and adjacent to the trail. When it comes back, clean it off again, quickly.
If the city leaves it there, the message it sends to everyone is that nobody cares about this place, and the police never patrol here. That encourages further bad behavior. Littering works this way too, which is why parts of a city with lots of litter usually have other crime too.
You want a crazy idea to fix graffiti? Tell residents they are allowed to cover up graffiti with plain gray paint whenever they encounter it on the trail. There are plenty of people in the city who love the trail system. A few of us would actually do this.
Second, police need to be regularly on the trail, either on foot, bicycle, or small vehicle. I use the trail all the time and have never, to my recollection, have encountered police on the trail. It seems the disordered recognize that the police prefer to operate from automobiles, so they just hang out in places automobiles can’t go. Police need to be there regularly, addressing any law breaking they come across. I think biking through a beautiful forest would be a desirable assignment.
Finally, we need to move out the homeless camps. No, you are not allowed to live in a city park or
under a bridge on the trail system. I have had to bicycle around people laying on the trail. If you bike the trail system around dusk, you will encounter people hauling bike trailers filled with trash or pushing grocery carts (stolen, and then left in the forest), heading to their campsite for the evening.
I am all for trying to find these people whatever help they need, but permitting them to live in our public parks cannot be the answer.
Finally, because I know Lansing cares about equity, this is a real equity issue. People at all income levels should have access to good public spaces. When you don’t enforce the law and the public spaces are degraded, people who have the means will move to where public spaces are still high quality. The wealthy always have access to good public spaces. The poor do only if we enforce the law.
Building beautiful public spaces is the first step, and we’ve done that. But defending them from individuals who would misuse them has to be the second step.
Allowing this beautiful trail system to decay is a choice. We can make a better one.
David Shane is a physicist and bicyclist in East Lansing, Michigan. He writes under Connecting Thoughts on Substack.
