Capital Observations I: MSU’s Walkable, Or Not-So-Walkable, Campus.
Since arriving at Michigan State, there’s a lot I’ve been impressed with. I will be writing about all of this in due time, too, don’t worry! There’s also some stuff I’ve been disappointed by– but certainly not surprised. The campus is immaculately maintained, for example. It’s a lot of lawn! As I just told my students today, lawn does have some benefits, even if it is categorically terrible at managing soil erosion. You can sit on it and have a picnic! This is harder with say, a stretch of six-foot-tall andropogon gerardii or helianthus annuus. So, in line with the idea of a well-maintained campus, we’d think that walking through it would be a fabulous exercise in sustainable urbanism. We faculty can safely walk across campus, crossing in the crosswalk and not getting run over! Right? Right?
Jurisdictional Questions
Not so fast, you rabid, left-wing academic city-slicker, you! Or at least, such has been the response of Michigan State’s Department of Police and Public Safety as well as of East Lansing’s own police department, which operates mostly off-campus (they did not say this verbatim, but I get the message).
Universities can be a weird animal in this regard, as MSU is big enough that it essentially operates as its own town of 50,000+ students and 12,000+ faculty and staff. It also operates most of its own facilities, including a power plant, chiller plant, and, as the state land grant university, even a dairy farm. MSU has what is known as “self-permitting” authority, for example, which means that it is allowed to allow itself to build its own buildings under its own authority. This might sound a bit weird, but when you think that a university is a very large bureaucracy with many interconnected stakeholder interests, the organism itself resembles a city more than it resembles, say, a grade school, so it makes sense.
ELPD sometimes comes onto campus, such as last month, when a driver failed to yield to a pedestrian crossing Circle Drive in front of the Michigan Student Union. The driver was issued a citation and the student was taken to the hospital. ELPD, for its part, seems woefully uninterested in enforcing the “yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk” rule on Grand River, which effectively forms the northern border of campus. I have an average of a close call each week with a car on Grand River, sometimes a twofer– an eastbound car while crossing north from the south side of the street and then a westbound (on the north side of the street). Or vice versa if I’m returning to my office. It’s a recurring discussion topic on Reddit, where we can also see graphic footage of a cyclist getting hit just a week ago (the cyclist was in the crosswalk but did not seem to have the right-of-way because it was at a light).
This Isn’t Our Priority, Bucko!
I recently complained to both the ELPD and DPPS that they need to do more to enforce Michigan’s existing traffic rules– like the one that says that cars are required by law to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk. ELPD’s response? We’ll pay more attention in the future. As for DPPS, well, the summarized response I got from them reads like this: You should connect with the active transportation committee, a voluntary committee that meets monthly and issues recommendation to DPPS and senior university leadership. In other words, DPPS implies here that they have no ability to actually respond to a staff member’s request to enforce traffic rules. This is the second time they’ve blown off a ticket I’ve opened, the first being when I mentioned to them that there seems to be no enforcement of giant vehicles in our parking ramp parking way over the lines and well into the aisles. The F-150 Super Duty State of Mind.
In faculty meetings, we’ve been talking about ideas for service projects, curriculum planning, and, generally, how we can build a more sustainable School. I’m hoping that one of the conversation topics will be how to make campus much safer for things other than giant trucks.
Go green. But, you know, when the light is green, I mean.
This is part of a series, Capital Observations, about urbanism in Lansing and East Lansing, Michigan, beginning in Fall 2024 with the start of the semester and Nat’s new life at MSU.
