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 says that if you, the homeowner, 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, because advocates 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 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 — to repair, build and maintain sidewalks as a connected public network.

Los Angeles underscores the contradiction. The law in L.A. still says adjacent property owners are responsible for sidewalk maintenance, although after years of litigation, the city also runs a public repair program for larger sidewalk projects. (Los Angeles settled a disability-access lawsuit in 2016 by agreeing to invest $1.3 billion in sidewalk repairs and track the status of the walkways, but residents lament the near-impossibility of getting problems repaired.)

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

Preparing to teach a course in 2009 about using digital maps to understand real-world problems, I dug into Denver’s data and came away impressed by the fact that they had a sidewalk layer, which is basically a digital map of the city’s paved walkways.

However, unlike nearly every other dataset the city provided, the sidewalk one hadn’t been updated since 2004. The logic seemed to be that not documenting the problem could protect the city from liability. But sticking your head in the sand is not much of a long-term strategy.

There is no such hesitancy with cities collecting roadway data. Why should sidewalks be given similar priority? 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 in which 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. Even so, Hoboken must be doing something right: It’s had nine consecutive years without a traffic fatality in a city of nearly 60,000 residents and with a daytime population of more than 90,000. Focusing on sidewalks first may be part of the explanation.

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. Springfield is looking to fix its sidewalks, but its approach is painful: giving a property owner just 30 days to fix their own sidewalk, and then adding the repair costs to their property tax bill if they don’t. There has to be a better way. In fact, I’ve seen it up close.

The sidewalk in front of my house in Denver had some lips and dips that in another city or another era 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, my city shows that making sidewalks a public responsibility is possible. And if you want to take a lesson from Hoboken to make your city safer, you can 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.

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Wes Marshall is a professor of civil engineering and construction at the University of Colorado Denver. This article was produced in partnership with the Conversation.

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