Many of them are cracked and bumpy. They stop and start abruptly. Some are 4 feet wide, some are 5 feet wide, and some are barely visible amid the overgrown grass.

Lawrence’s sidewalks are in sore need of improvements, some residents say.

“They’re terrible,” said 78-year-old Hilde Farley, who walks with a cane and blames bad sidewalks along Princeton Drive for two falls she’s suffered since fall 2004. In one of the falls, she injured an eye and eventually needed a new cornea, she said.

“I’m not the kind of person to want to sue anybody,” Farley said. “I just want good sidewalks.”

Keeping sidewalks in good repair is the legal responsibility of the property owner adjacent to the sidewalk. But take a stroll through a neighborhood, and it’s obvious that many people aren’t getting the message.

“For people who are physically impaired or visually impaired, there are some really terrible and dangerous situations in town,” said Danny Drungilas, co-chairman of the city’s Pedestrian Advisory Committee, which formed last year.

Hilde Farley takes her afternoon walk Friday near her home. Farley says she injured herself twice while walking on bad sidewalks and would like to see them fixed.

Another issue that concerns Drungilas is that many areas throughout the city have been built with no sidewalks or spotty sidewalks. For example, he mentioned the sidewalks that start and stop along busy thoroughfares such as 23rd Street and Iowa Street.

Mayor Boog Highberger said he thinks it’s time for the city to take more of a role in sidewalk maintenance instead of just leaving it up to property owners.

“To get it done right, there will have to be some city participation,” he said. “We will have to look at the appropriate way to allocate the burden between the homeowners and the city. … It’s something we could be doing better.”

City staff members, at the request of the commission, are mapping out a citywide inventory that will show where the gaps in sidewalks are. Eventually it could be used to identify the existing sidewalks most in need of repair.

But a repair program wouldn’t be cheap, given that it can cost $10 to $15 per foot to remove and replace a length of sidewalk.

“We’re trying to do what we can, but the funds are very limited,” said Chuck Soules, the city’s director of public works. “Several years ago we had some money specifically budgeted for sidewalk gaps, but at this point we don’t.”

Property owner Bill Flohrs said he thinks Lawrence should follow the lead of Overland Park, which has a repair program that addresses the most severe sidewalk problems in order of priority.

Flohrs, an Overland Park resident, recently bought a home in the 1800 block of Maine Street for his children while they attend Kansas University. He said he was shocked to learn after buying the home that it was his responsibility to replace the crumbling sidewalk, especially given that it’s on city property.

Now, $1,250 later, he has a new 5-foot-wide sidewalk. His neighbors have a mix of sidewalks that are either crumbling, non-existent or more narrow than his.

“It’s a joke. It makes the neighborhood look bad,” he said. “It shows that the city has no foresight whatsoever. … I just can’t believe the people of Lawrence have put up with it.”

Flohrs said another solution would be a tax-credit program that allowed homeowners to credit the price of repairing a sidewalk against their property-tax bill.

Farley, the resident who fell twice in recent years, said she thinks that in the worst cases, the city should repair the sidewalk, then put the cost on the property owner’s tax bill.

Soules said Lawrence shies away from that kind of approach.

“We could legally do that,” he said. “We haven’t been given that direction by the commission. The commission would rather see city staff work with property owners and get an amicable solution. … There’s a few people that would probably say ‘Have the city go fix every sidewalk’ until it gets to their front door.”