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.

Spring Break Connections

I survived the first week back from break! It ended yesterday with an assignment that had a due date of 5pm on a Saturday.  Ridiculous, but I survived.  Now, to recall what I spent my time doing over break with Boulder County.

I have already explained the first day, but on the second day I attended a meeting for the EnergySmart program in the morning. It is an energy efficiency program that was recently awarded some federal money to help homeowners and businesses to increase efficiency by providing rebates on certain things.  The simple parts are replacing light bulbs, but it moves up from there to tune up HVAC systems, insulation, roofs, and appliances such as industrial refrigerators.  Check out a press release here.

Later in the day, I met one of the county land use planners and talked about land use planning and things like the urban growth boundary system the county and municipalities have set up, and site plan review.  Boulder also has a transfer of development credits (TDC) program that is pretty neat.  In the county, a home cannot be larger than 6,000 sq ft, which is a decent size, but with development in recent years (pre-housing crash) it was normal to see larger than 10,000 sq ft homes in rural areas.  The TDC program allows owners of smaller homes give up the ability to expand their homes up to a certain amount in exchange for money and the footage given up can be used by the purchaser to build a larger home that would normally not be allowed.

Finally, I ended my Tuesday by meeting with a couple of county transportation planners.  We briefly talked about the push for alternative modes of transportation in the county, and then onto a specific project - the Eco Pass.  The Eco Pass is a bus pass that a business or neighborhood can purchase for employees or residents.  What we talked about more was the community Eco Pass.  The county has done this with Lyons where the county pays RTD the projected cost of the route that runs into town, and every resident gets a pass to use.  As ridership increases the cost would presumably increase, but it allows every person in the small town to get on a bus and not drive into Boulder or wherever else they go.  The county was working on setting this up for Nederland as well, and this is where I come in.  In order to figure out how much money they owed RTD, they needed some data about how people paid for their bus fare, so they were not paying double for those people who already had a free fare.  So, I rode the bus up and back 3 times over the rest of the week to get some preliminary data, talk to some drivers to maybe get them interested in helping out, and just to see the beauty of Boulder Canyon.

On Wednesday I had a meeting with another person in land use talking about the response to the Four Mile Fire and what is being done to help affected homeowners and some more about Boulder, like the 50ft building height limit in the city, rising property values, and what is "sustainable" in the different municipalities.

On Thursday I had yet another meeting in land use with a forestry person, again talking about the fire.  We discussed how if progressed, what actions were taken, and how better control of trees could have prevented much of the damage.  Growth was allowed so the forest was all trees instead of a more natural grouping of trees with open grass spaces between that could have allowed the fire to burn itself out easier.

I also attended a transportation master plan meeting.  Finally, on Friday morning I was a part of a meeting to revise a set of maps showing different social welfare programs across the county.

It was a great week, and I learned some valuable things about planning from it.  Maybe I need to move there next...

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.

Spring Break in Boulder

If you have seen my Twitter or Facebook recently, you might know that I am on Spring Break.  For break, I am participating in a job placement program that the architecture and urban planning programs put on.  I requested a placement in the Denver/Boulder area of Colorado and ended up with a placement at Boulder County Public Health working with a University of Michigan urban planning alum in the environmental health department.

I started there today.  I got to work on some computer mapping and began reading through a study of different communities and how they go about using planning of the physical environment to benefit public health.  Later in the week it looks like I will get to meet with some people doing land use and transportation planning too.

The benefit of being placed in Boulder (beyond the weather, mountains, and beer) is being able to stay and catch up with my buddy Jon who is going to school out here now.  It has been a great time!

I'll try to write more when the week is finished.

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.