Sunday Drive takes on Michigan Avenue - Detroit

This past Sunday afternoon I decided to take a drive and ended up driving from Ypsilanti to Detroit along Michigan Avenue.  I took some pictures along the way.

Wayne and Inkser - a fairly desolate landscape.

Entering Dearborn.  Road narrows. Not too shabby.

Road re-widens - the typical Detroit area 4-lane.

 These wide roads have always confused me.  Detroit was built on the automobile, I get that, but these roads still suck.  I don't think they are really even hospitable for driving on with the width, speed and intersection design, let alone anything else.

Ford Taurus driving by a Ford building.

Some vacant land and whatnot.

Skyline - and yes, that is a bike lane to the right.

Michigan Central Station - abandoned and iconic.

It is really interesting to drive from the suburbs into the city and see changes along the way.  This one was different coming from the west instead of previous trips coming in from the north.  Going through the industry in Wayne and Inkster is a lot different than rolling through Pontiac, Bloomfield Hills, and Royal Oak.

I think this was a good engagement of the region for me, and hopefully I can get out to see places in the future.  Maybe even stopping for more interaction.  In any case, I think I might try to continue making "Sunday Drive" posts just as incentive and to share what I see.

Trains Down the Middle

I am back from Colorado, but providing an update on what I did for most of the week is on hold while I work on settling back in and reorienting myself to "school."

I managed to buy a crazy amount of groceries, unpack, and clean up my room today, so hopefully the update will be sooner rather than later. For now, I leave you with a video a few of my classmates made to promote center-running light rail along the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit:

Detroit needs better transit options. You should submit some comments about it. More information at Transport Michigan.

The Future of Planning

Last Friday, the University of Michigan played host for the Michigan Association of Planning Student Conference.  There were also students from Michigan State, Western, Eastern, Central, Wayne State, and Lawrence Tech who attended the day-long event.  Unfortunately, because of work, I missed the afternoon session, but I did manage to catch some morning presentations, enjoy lunch, and make it back in time for the social gathering at Grizzly Peak, a local watering hole.

An opening talk was given by the Dean from LTU, on the topic of "Tales of Detroit & New Orleans Climate Change."  There are some interesting parallels between the two cities even though the problems of one occurred by natural disaster and the other by much more human oriented reasons.  Detroit can also look at New Orleans to see how it might be able to do some of its rebuilding.  However, the most intriguing part of the presentation was the suggestion that, because of climate change, Detroit and the rest of the Midwestern rust belt can rebound.

Most booming cities of the last few decades have been in the south and the west, or what is often called the Sun Belt because those regions have a much warmer climate, not to mention natural resources, space, and people.  People want to be where its nicer, but with climate change increasing temperatures these places may become unbearable for certain periods of time.  The Sun Belt is also prone to greater numbers of natural disasters than Michigan is, and those may increase in magnitude or happen more often.  So, it was suggested that if Michigan and the upper Midwest can maintain a minimal amount of diversity and create a decent economic climate, people will return once again.  There will be another shift from the Sun Belt back to the "Great Midwestern Greenbelt" where our summers will be like northern Arkansas and our winters like southern Ohio.

Beyond this presentation, I went to a session of student presentations on data visualization, urban agriculture in Detroit, light rail on the Woodward Avenue corridor in Detroit, and the concept of a "Recovery Park" for a Detroit neighborhood.  These were all good presentations and showed some of the diversity of what planning students from around the state are working on.  Unfortunately, by missing the afternoon session, I was a bad peer and missed all of the presentations given by my Michigan classmates.

The conference was pretty good for what I made it for, including a delicious lunch and drinks afterwards.  It was nice to take a break from the normal schedule of classes for this, and seeing what other students are doing was cool instead of always seeing professors and professionals talk about their stuff.

Detroit Works

On Wednesday, another planner and I decided to attend a community meeting for the Detroit Works Project.  As everyone knows, the city of Detroit is struggling and has lost over half its population during the past 50 years.  Now, the city is trying to figure out ways to provide essential services like water and garbage pick-up, improve public transportation options, position the school system for success, and fix the problems of blight and vacant land.  Part of the solution may be creating incentives for people who move to different neighborhoods and increase density.  The list goes on.

This past fall, the city held a first round of large meetings that were overcapacity and resulted in yelling (or so I'm told because I didn't make it to any).  So, now the city is in the middle of providing 30+ meetings in various neighborhoods throughout the city in order to get feedback and hear about specific issues from those areas.

The meeting I went to was on the west side of the city, just north of Dearborn.  Information about some of the ideas that have been talked about was given, and a lot of questions were asked of the audience about these ideas.  Real-time answers were given on the screen by use of keypads that were located on each seat.  Following this was an extensive question and answer session, and members of various departments in the City of Detroit were present to provide the answers.

Nothing truly groundbreaking occurred, but it was awesome to see and be involved with the public process and see how citizens are being included with this monumental plan Detroit is trying to piece together.  The city will use the feedback from the questions to help gauge what needs to happen first or where to focus its investments.  Hopefully, in the end, this plan can help Detroit get back on track for greatness.