Written By: Chris Sunderlin

Utica, NY

Crosswalks for Museums, Not for Children

Walk around any Rust Belt city and you can tell exactly who is valued by the way the streets are designed.

The art museum has seventeen dedicated crosswalks and multiple flashing speed signs surrounding it. The message is unmistakable: protect the people who matter.

Now visit the schools.

Outside Proctor High School, a speeding driver struck a child during dismissal time. The driver was later charged with reckless endangerment and speeding in a school zone. The child crossing the street outside the school ended up in the hospital.

Students still cross that corridor every day.

Now visit the neighborhoods.

When Nyah Mway, a 13-year-old boy, was profiled by police, one of the justifications offered for that profiling was that he was “walking in the street.” That detail was repeated publicly, as though it explained something.

But walk around Utica yourself.

Sidewalks are cracked, uneven, disappearing in places. Inconsistent lighting. Long stretches where snow and debris accumulate. Sections where pedestrians are forced into the road simply because the infrastructure gives them no alternative, only to get the snickers and glares from the suburban commuters.

We police the behavior of children navigating broken systems instead of fixing those systems.

This is not coincidence. It is design.

Infrastructure decisions are moral decisions poured into concrete. When seventeen crosswalks appear around a cultural institution, that is intentional. When school zones lack raised crossings, flashing beacons, narrowed lanes, and pedestrian priority design, that too is intentional. When working-class neighborhoods receive deterred maintenance and then residents are scrutinized for how they move through them, that is intentional neglect layered with enforcement.

Neighborhoods filled with refugees, immigrants, and working families receive a fraction of the investment directed toward affluent districts and tourist corridors. Yet when a marathon or regional event arrives, funding suddenly materializes for resurfacing, repainting, beautification, and spectacle.

The capacity exists.

The will does not.

We should not have to wait for a student to be hit outside a high school. We should not tolerate children being profiled for navigating streets that were never built safely for them in the first place.

Schools should automatically receive the strongest pedestrian protections in the city: raised crosswalks, speed tables, flashing signals, narrowed lanes, and consistent maintenance of sidewalks. Infrastructure should protect children before police encounter them, not become the pretext for suspicion.

Infrastructure doesn’t lie. It reveals who is prioritized before anyone says a word.

If museum patrons deserve seventeen crosswalks, then children deserve more than broken sidewalks and scrutiny.

Crosswalks are not luxury features. They are moral commitments in paint and concrete.

And right now, the paint tells a story we should not be proud of.

This is not a critique of a city struggling with a fifty percent population loss over two generations. Anyone paying attention understands that capacity has limits.

This is a critique of how we think about whose safety is optional, whose movement is suspicious, and whose inconvenience is acceptable.

I do not want better sidewalks alone. I want better thinking from leaders. Because streets built without care teach us how to look at one another long before policy, policing, or rhetoric ever does.