I would say this might be the most forlorn stretch of sidewalk in Lansing, except I’m not sure I should dignify this narrow strip of asphalt by calling it a sidewalk. It’s along the former ramp that serviced East Malcolm X Street from northbound Aurelius Road. It must have been laid along the ramp with the intent of serving as a sidewalk, yet I don’t know why. Until I walked on it to take these pictures, I had never walked down there myself and was surprised to discover it even had a sidewalk. It makes a sharp turn under the overpass and eventually comes out in the Potter-Walsh neighborhood. There are at least two better and shorter ways for a pedestrian to get to Potter-Walsh from here, and walking so close to the ramp when there was any traffic on it must have been unpleasant to say the least.

I walked it, though, and since I’m a rules-abiding person (probably to a fault) I got a little thrill from this laughably minor transgression. This ramp has been amputated from Aurelius Rd. and, despite still having street lamps beaming down on it at night, it now has no purpose. When they rebuilt the railway overpass recently, they also quietly decommissioned the ramp. The southern end of it, where the ramp splits off from Aurelius, has been removed. The rest has been left alone, with a surprisingly neat curb capping its new end.

When I moved to town and for a while after, there was a sign on northbound Aurelius directing downtown traffic to use what was then the Main Street ramp. I was mystified by this when I first saw it. What crazy person would use that spooky alley to get downtown when you could just go up to Michigan and turn left? And why the heck is that nothing road called “Main Street”?

What I was looking at was the remnant of some previous attempt to stop traffic on Aurelius, which was then a four-lane road, from blazing right into a residential neighborhood at highway speeds as Aurelius became Clemens Avenue. This had been a sore point for Clemens residents for a long time by then. The ramp was an attempt to funnel downtown-bound traffic away from Clemens. As far as I can tell, no one was fooled. I’m not sure when the sign went away but it might have been when they tried the next (and possibly more successful) traffic calming measure: around 2002, they reduced Aurelius to two lanes and lowered the speed limit.

I guess they must have decided that the ramp was a failed experiment and took the bridge reconstruction as an opportunity to remove it. Northbound traffic headed for Malcolm X can still get there by the more direct route, taking a left turn a little way further north.