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Michigan is the car manufacturing capital of the country, so it’s no surprise that many roads across the state were built for cars. But some communities like a mid-Michigan town are trying to make their streets more pedestrian-friendly.
It’s a bit difficult to carry a conversation on Mission Street in Mount Pleasant as hundreds of cars zoom up and down the road.
"Here, you see someone waiting to cross at the crosswalk," said Matt Liesch, a geography professor with Central Michigan University. "He’s running. You see that sometimes, people running across this. They’re doing it for their own safety."
Liesch is pointing at a small median in the road — a little concrete island between four lanes of high-speed traffic where this pedestrian was running to.
This is the only crosswalk for a quarter mile in either direction.
“There’s no shortage of intersections like this across Michigan, and communities are thinking about how best can we retrofit this in an inclusive way," Liesch said.
Around 21,000 cars pass through Mission Street every day, according to the Michigan Department of Transportation. Most of this is local traffic, people going to fast-food joints, big department stores or crossing town to go to work.
But these kinds of roads are not designed to meet everyone's travel needs. And more municipalities like Grand Rapids, Lansing and Traverse City are revamping similar roads for new uses.
"Having these relatively wide roads with multiple lanes of traffic in each direction, plus turn lanes in the center, this is part of a nationwide trend in the 1960s, 70s and into the 80s," Liesch said.
Liesch said a few factors make roads like Mission unfriendly to pedestrians: the 45-mile speed limit, businesses that are set too far back and lots of curb cuts or driveways that break up the sidewalk.
“So one of the challenges with any sort of evolution of a street anywhere in the United States is making sure it serves a wide variety of user groups,” Liesch said.
In a recent survey, nearly half of more than one thousand respondents said they were “unsatisfied” or “very unsatisfied” with getting in and out of destinations along Mission Street.
Roughly 400 car crashes happened on this road within the last year, according to the Mount Pleasant Police Department. And earlier this year, a 39-year-old man and his dog were killed when crossing the street on foot.
The city of Mount Pleasant has been eyeing Mission for redevelopment for years, and some locals say they’re ready.
“Nobody wants to drive there, nobody wants to walk there,” said CMU student Avery Geisen.
“Not really attractive. I mean pavement and parking lots, that’s what we’ve got now,” said Gary Kramer, a Mount Pleasant resident.
“It’s horrible! It’s so dangerous! I take back roads when I can,” said Caroline Roberts, also of Mount Pleasant.
They were at an open house, hosted by the city, to review ideas on how Mission Street could be better. Some proposals involve putting in a center median, adding landscaping buffers along sidewalks, creating bike lanes and putting in more pedestrian crossings.
“Good design comes from a lot of people coming together and saying this is how we want to build our community,” said Mausharie Valentine, an urban designer with the firm Progressive Companies, which is behind the plans to improve Mission.
Valentine said similar roads are everywhere, and they’re the product of a car-centric world.
“As people began to get cars, they wanted to move faster and be more efficient," Valentine said. "So, you get wider lanes, you get more lanes to get more people flowing through. As you get cars moving faster, you get more fatalities and poor decision-making.”
The city doesn't have any solid plans to redevelop Mission yet and is just gathering public feedback.
Mount Pleasant planning director, Manuela Powidayko, told WCMU the city hopes to have a conceptual design completed, approved and included in the master plan next year.
Michelle Sponseller, with the city and Mission/Pickard Downtown Development Authority, said local officials first identified Mission as a problem in 2009, but there weren’t any good examples for how to retrofit this old highway turned commercial district.
“We would have been, if you will, the first to try something, and that was just a no-go at that point in time quite frankly,” Sponseller said.
MDOT plans to repave the road soon in 2026 and 2027, so there’s an opportunity to modernize Mission, if the city can get access to federal funding. Sponseller adds, there’s now more models to go off.
"There’s no way to really know (whether this will be constructed)," Sponseller said. "All we can do is put the pieces together for whoever comes down the road."
