PITTSBURGH — Damitra Penny-Harris is regularly yelled at by drivers for taking her powered wheelchair on the road.
Once, on a long hilly stretch of walkway, she nearly made it to her destination, but the final block of sidewalks was cracked and impassable for her chair. She had to retrace her steps to the bottom of the hill and start over, this time in the roadway.
“There was no way I could get past it, and then somebody hollers at me ‘get off the street’ but I don’t have a choice,” she said. “This person didn’t fix their sidewalk so I have no choice but to be in the street.”
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Multiple times a year, Alisa Grishman has to go through the arduous process of replacing wheels on her wheelchair because of the damage caused by cracked and broken sidewalks.
It takes months for replacements to arrive. To prevent being stuck at home, she sometimes has to duct tape a wheel to hold it together.
For Pittsburghers like Grisham and Penny-Harris, the lack of reliable walkways means just getting from point A to point B becomes a difficult challenge — trips take longer, routes have to be planned in advance, just getting groceries is “beyond a nuisance,” Grishman said.
As a whole, the sidewalks in Pittsburgh are “pretty bad,” said Seth Bush, the senior advocacy manager for Bike Pittsburgh. Through his role at the nonprofit, Bush also helps coordinate with Pittsburgh Walks, a coalition of transit advocacy and community groups that work to make the streets in Pittsburgh safer and more accessible.
Surveying the damage
Pittsburgh Walks has been working with the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to catalog where sidewalks exist, what condition they’re in and where they’re missing.
Dubbed the Safe Sidewalks Crew, volunteers survey the sidewalks in their neighborhoods and have used that data to create a dashboard detailing the status of the walkways across the city.
“It’s pretty rare that when we go out and do a survey … that we don’t find some problem that is at least the beginning of an accessibility issue,” Bush said. “There are a lot of sidewalks that are cracked or uneven. Not all of those are entirely inaccessible to someone in a wheelchair or walker, but it makes it harder.”
In about 18 months, the group has surveyed between 4,000 and 5,000 blocks of sidewalks, Bush said. Part of the group’s goal is to create a database of the city’s sidewalks to determine exactly how widespread the problem is. The city’s own sidewalk dashboard doesn’t detail the conditions of the walkways.
He said that most of the sidewalks he comes across have “at least one major issue” such as major gaps or cracks, or larger obstructions like parked cars or trash cans that haven’t been properly stored.
“It only takes one block for a sidewalk to not be accessible,” Penny-Harris said.
Penny-Harris joined the team last October during a sidewalk audit on Brownsville Road in Carrick — the same stretch of roadway where a 17-year old girl would be fatally hit by a vehicle two months later during a snow squall.
The sidewalk was so dilapidated that the team had to end the audit early because Penny-Harris could not get by.
“Every time we would go somewhere, the sidewalk would be messed up and I’d have to stop, go back, and cross the street,” she said.
In other places, the structure of the sidewalk isn’t the problem, it’s the lack of a dedicated pedestrian walkway altogether. In many of these spots, there are bus stops but nowhere for pedestrians to safely go when they get off.
Grishman, who frequently reports sidewalk issues to the city, said those areas are difficult for everyone, not just people using mobility aids. But it’s sometimes hard to speak up to officials to get the problem solved.
“It’s always a balance, because the response might be to remove the bus stop instead of paving a sidewalk,” Grishman said.
Across Pennsylvania, almost two-thirds of pedestrian fatalities happen on streets where there aren’t sidewalks, according to a 2025 study by the Governor’s Highway Safety Association.
“It’s not that people don’t want to walk on sidewalks, it’s that they don’t have a choice,” Bush said.
Transit advocates and everyday users have come to the same conclusion for improving pedestrian walkways: more funding.
“Bottom line, we need more money,” Bush said. “We need more resources and funding going toward our sidewalks.”
“I don’t know where that money comes from when our budget is so tight, but it’s needed,” he said. “The more our sidewalks crumble and get forgotten about, the more our communities suffer.”
In the city’s 2026 capital budget, a little over a half a million dollars has been allocated to ramp and sidewalk improvements.
But the money from the city only goes so far.
Public walkways, private costs
In Pittsburgh — and in dozens of other cities across the country — property owners are responsible for sidewalk repairs in front of their homes.
Because of this, the city can’t just decide to go in and pave entire stretches of sidewalks, and for many property owners, sidewalk restorations rank low on the list of home repairs.
“There’s a lot that government agencies could and should be doing to repair our sidewalk network, but I think the majority are privately owned and it’s expensive to repair sidewalks,” Bush said.
That also often means the sidewalks in under-invested neighborhoods are in worse condition than wealthier neighborhoods, Bush said.
Property owners can be fined by the city for problems with their sidewalks — if the issue persists, a lien could be placed on the property or the owner could be taken to civil court.
In cities like Fort Worth, Texas, failure to repair sidewalks could result in a misdemeanor charge.
Four years ago, voters in Denver approved an ordinance that shifted responsibility from property owners to the city. Now, residents pay a $150 annual fee as part of their stormwater bill, which goes toward sidewalk repairs and recurring maintenance.
Pittsburgh has two ongoing sidewalk programs: one to build sidewalks in areas where there aren’t any, and another to help low-income property owners repair their sidewalks.
“The city does have some good frameworks, but there’s more work to be done,” Bush said.
Mayor Corey O’Connor’s office said there are nine ongoing projects to fill sidewalk gaps across the city. So far, 14 property owners have applied for the financial assistance program and three have successfully had their sidewalks repaired, the mayor’s office said.
“Maintaining sidewalks is part of the larger work of making Pittsburgh safer and more accessible for everyone,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “Closing sidewalk gaps, repairing deteriorated sidewalks and improving our understanding of sidewalk conditions all contribute to our Vision Zero goals and help ensure that everyone can safely walk and use mobility devices across Pittsburgh.”
Bush said he’s seen firsthand the success of the critical sidewalk gap program, which connects areas where there aren’t any walkways.
In Windgap, the team closed sidewalk gaps around a playground. Now, he said, the kids have a safe way of getting there and cars appear to drive slower in the neighborhood than they did before the sidewalks were built.
“They need more resources to do more of that work,” he said.
The benefits extend beyond just the select few who live near the improvements, Bush said. From parents with young kids to people with disabilities, it’s an improvement that benefits both the people who live in the city and visitors.
“We can make everything else accessible, but what’s the point if you can’t get there?” Grishman said.
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