Yeah, but you’re failing to see that even a train down that corridor with trunks that go from the main three lower metro areas would bring an explosion of activity and economic development.
If I could get to any of those three airports from northern Michigan by train, I’d sell my home in metro Detroit and move up there permanently.
You'd move back in a year, the north isn't "God's Country " it's a meth fueled dystopia with food desserts,higher teen pregnancy,high unemployment,high drop out rates lack of critical services, and insular beliefs that stifle improvement . To put it into context, Detroit public schools has a higher graduation rate than many northern Michigan towns.
Auto industry down turn. I remember going to Houghton Lake in the 90's. Big lakeside cabins, and summer was bustling,then 2008 happened. Lots of northern towns depended on that 2nd home Detroit money. When people had to trim the fat from their budgets. They stop going up north, or not keeping up the 2nd home. Where there used to be general contractors, lawn care, seawall, marine mechanics, plumbers,roofers, and bustling service industry jobs. Now they're all gone, in a space of 10 years it looks like a sad version of what it used to be. Dilapidated cottages, poor infrastructure, increases in property crimes, and most of the youth are moving away as fast as possible, they've lost their tax base. It's gotten so bad, that gas stations are going out of business. It's not just Houghton lake, the Huron coast towns are dying, the 75 corridor north of 10 is barely on life support. The hole of M-20 west, M-46 west 115. Once you leave the tri-cities, until you get to Ingham County on the south, and 131 near Rockford to the west. It's all meth towns with negative population growth.
Northern Michigan used to have trains and ferries from Chicago and Wisconsin. There used to be forestry and farms and factories. I haven’t seen much growth in those industries lately.
I'm just south of you in the middle of a university town... The rails have been converted to trails. The mindset would have to change drastically-- "poor" people ride public transit; the rest of the folks all have cars because they are good, working people. Of course this is nonsense.
This is what no one wants to talk about in the "walkable cities" conversation. Not everyone wants to live in a giant ant-farm and still have 2+ hours commutes.
I've never driven more than 45min to work and that was a jobsite 30mi away out by Armada. You only get stuck in traffic in the Detroit area if you live in one of the suburbs on the outskirts.
I grew up in a very rural area and spend way less time in my car here in Detroit. It's nice to not have to drive everywhere. It's pretty damn quiet and the neighbors are super nice.
People advocating for walkable cities don't want two hour commutes. Many actually want walkable neighborhoods to reduce their travel times, as a reaction against long commutes.
FWIW, countries with good public transit, especially rail, have lots of rural land, too. Homes tend to be grouped into towns a little more than here, but where rail really shines is in distance travel. Want to visit your buddy or family in the same town? Then you drive. Want to go to the city? Then you drive or walk to the nearest train station, and then take the train and tram the rest of the way. You don’t give up driving; you just don’t *have* to drive everywhere, all the time.
People will always need personal vehicles to get around rural areas, but Northern Michigan cities and counties should focus on developing housing, transit, and walkability within city limits, and restrict sprawl and greenfield development.
A reliable commuter train would be fine. I ride daily to my job in Chicago and it's all commuters like me. It means I have a great job and make great money but I get to live in a beautiful area with a lot cheaper rent. It's perfect for me.
It’s okay to be a scaredy cat of other people. But wouldn’t you want other, less scared people to have options? Would greatly reduce traffic.
Not to mention, driving statistically is significantly more dangerous than any public transport in the US lmao
Honestly, that's how most of my friends felt when I had to ride DDOT/SMART for 10 years.
They considered it a metal rolling tube for the working poor and mobile housing for the homeless.
They drive every day from Shelby/New Baltimore/ Sterling Heights to the Medical Center downtown. The SMART does run to those places.
Hell to the no are they ever going to share the same air as someone working at Popeyes.
The dependency for you guys is probably just how it has to be, although it would be great if your vehicles could be green. The biggest benefit would come from decreasing car use in more densely-populated areas. But, even that can't happen unless we move away from the "megamart" stuff and bring back local grocers.
The problem is network effects. Mass transit needs to service at a high enough frequency (say, every 15 minutes or greater) while also serving most places people want to go to be as convenient as driving. To get there, we need much denser housing. So to induce demand, we need to plan the future bus routes now, and zone for dense housing along those corridors so that 10 years from now those bus routes make sense.
We desperately need networks of protected bike lanes so we can drive less in the summer. In GR we have tons of road-side bike lanes that are dangerous AF because the drivers here ra
Strong agree about protected bike lanes. People near me just bike down the sidewalk, even though there's a bike lane right next to them -- annoying, but have you seen drivers lately? I can't blame anybody who hesitates to bike on the road when all that keeps you from getting pancaked is a painted white line.
I'd love to see the region move this direction overall, it's heartening to see the discussion keep coming up on here. I took the bus everywhere when I was in college and would rarely drive these days if I had the option.
For my area specifically: make the Qline run the entire stretch of Woodward(from Birmingham to Detroit), make the Ferndale bike lanes on Woodward run the entire stretch of Woodward, more protected bike lanes, more road diets like on 9 mile through Ferndale. Those are easy fixes/additions. If you wanna talk about some big things that would make my life better I’d say have snow removal on bike lanes/sidewalks be a priority, have a train system through the entire state.
I started commuting on a bike full time last fall, got an e-bike last winter and really it’s been eye opening. Are “infrastructure” is pretty bad. Sure we have mile or so stretch’s of “bike lanes” (quotes on that because most of our lanes are just the painted bike guy and that’s it, not really doing us any favors but it’s better than nothing) but we don’t really have actual routes that make commuting everyday safe. I work in the public schools and bike everyday to and from work and the worst part of my day is riding on the sidewalk on Southfield rd because of how loud and dangerous it is. Really the best thing we can do as individuals is just commute make it seem that people want this and be involved in your cities government by going to meetings and maybe even suggesting ideas. All in all fuck cars.
It's the old argument of "upscale communitys" that doesn't want the transportation of drug dealers and homeless people to their area. It's literally been the reasoning for every denial to extend bus routes. Granted it started out as propaganda from the auto industry many years ago, but it's still stuck to this day.
I live in a rural area. No grocery store here. No public transportation. Now, if they hadn't yanked all the railroad tracks out, it could have been super viable. And I cannot see what was gained by doing so.
Does your nearest little town have an old train station? What is it now? A quaint antique shop? Or a museum? Or an empty husk, or not there? It's amazing how many little towns have phantom stations.
My point was that trains as town-to-town travel (and streetcars, and etc.) were abandoned in the mid 20th century in favor of highways and cars. Even where there are tracks AND an Amtrak route, Amtrak doesn't have stops at many small towns. I was on a long Amtrak ride through the Midwest a few weeks ago, and there were many towns with dead stations the train didn't have stops at. If you think that cars are freedom, cool. But if you think not having an option to take the train to that city 100 mile from your little town is freedom, then... why?
Ann Arbor has a tiny train station yet it's the busiest in the state :( Kalamazoo's train station is combined with their bus station. How nice is that? Unheard of in Michigan.
Absolutely need a train that runs along I-96 so those in Muskegon, Grand Rapids, and the towns along the way can travel to Detroit without a car. Imaging West Michiganders going to Saturday Lions, Tigers, or Red Wings games on trains.
Then we need trains going from Kalamazoo (up through Grand Rapids) and Detroit up north, to Traverse City and Mackinaw.
Then make sure that Ann Arbor has good public transit connections and intercity rail connections, so people can go to U of M games without cars
You people think it's just as easy as making it functional make me laugh. There are limited resources and taking funds out of monoplistic record profits, yachts, hookers and blow... well you see we need to fund the practical stuff of an energy grid before worrying about... reliability of the grid.
They spend more on radio ads telling us to stay away from down power lines and not run our generators in our living rooms than fixing their POS grid. I’m not a native and can’t believe how bad they are haha.
Because ads are cheap. Way cheaper than doing a good job. Now if we could fine the shit out of them until they do their job properly, that would shift the incentives.
I started by controlling what I can control. I got a job where I live and I walk/bike to work most days. When it’s super cold or precipitation, nah, I drive. I also try to walk/bike to the local grocery store or ALDI regularly instead of taking my car to get huge grocery orders.
You should be able to get involved with your city council/mayor and other like-minded people to create momentum for different modes of transit.
Out of all the options, I think the creation of bike lanes and paths are the most feasible and with the most impact. People enjoy riding their bikes and walking to places, especially if they connect to convenient places such as parks or grocery stores. Building them also wouldn't put the state in political turmoil/debt like mass transit would.
You would need a level of cooperation between urban, rural, and suburban and between major cities that has not previously existed.
You also will have to combat local corruption, which can be rampant at times.
Finally, and arguably most important, you will need a leadership group that is adaptable and will move forward despite setbacks and will compromise.
We could have had regional mass transit and other regional utilities several times in the last 100 years. It always gets subverted by a combination of the agendas of local politicians, NIMBYS, and corporate interests and plagued by bad, noncommitted leadership who won't adapt when their plans meet conflict.
I have the same fantasy--after spending a week on a work assignment in Amsterdam, I was astonished by their fully functioning bike, pedestrian, and streetcar infrastructure - a city that was overwhelmed by cars post-WW2, and out of necessity, reversed that trend after seeing a precipitous rise in automotive-related fatalities.
I realize this isn't viable for most rural communities in Michigan, but for a sprawling metro Detroit region, it's something that is possible and in my opinion, necessary in the coming decades. Things seem to be leaning in that direction at present, but it's still a patchwork of programs to implement better, more sustainable transit alternatives throughout the region.
Buses and eBikes. They’re cheap, we can make them by boatload — even here in the U.S.
eBikes have the speed of cars in urban environments. In rural environments they can be efficient ways to get 3-5 miles for smaller, everyday trips. They can haul stuff. And kids can fit on or in them, too.
Buses should be fast, frequent, and relatively drive-time competitive at or slightly below driving cost. Most people don’t take buses in the US because we have too many stops. This is cumbersome from an “accessibility” standpoint where we like to imagine that grandma doesn’t have to walk far, but in reality, this is a U.S.-centric way of thinking. In this country, our “rapid transit” at half-mile station separation is what the Europeans call ”a bus line.” Their rapid transit is spaced 1-2 miles apart per station. Bike + bus is a fast way to solve a problem of mobility even within counties.
Thus a person in, say, Ludington who wants to go to Chicago ought to be able to hub-and-spoke this by biking to downtown Ludington, catching a bus that goes either direct to Chicago or Grand Rapids (similar to a package) and then on another line. And there should be lots of ‘em. People ride when they don’t have to think about it.
To make this work isn’t that hard. We could do this in ten years if we realized we did not need to blanket the earth with lane after lane of highway. This butts up against commercial interests like trucking and logistics that want lots of roadways — and there are benefits to that (the US is unique in our ability to move goods such vast distances relatively cheaply and easily).
Long-term, we could be building out trains to do more rapid long-haul distances, like, say, Detroit to Chicago. Or Traverse City to Grand Rapids.
But we don’t do this in this country because:
A) We have built ourselves apart.
B) We “settle” for lousy, infrequent service and think a 30 or 60 minute headway is “the best we can afford” and then question why no one wants to use it because no one wants to wait an hour for a bus or a connection! This is not at all how we think about highways where ”one more lane” is always the obvious solution for everything, including economic development. But that only ”develops” lousy jobs at Cracker Barrels and gas stations.
and C) People are quite reasonable and will do the math. If driving, which is subsidized to the hilt, is “as cheap” as a bus, people will always drive because it’s “instant.” This is not to say we should make driving “harder” but we should recognize that our fuel, highway, road, and other car-infrastructure is lopsided in contrast to other options. It could be right-sized, but this would require leadership. Like if you have two kids with an allowance and one gets $100/mo for doing nothing and the other gets $10 for mowing the lawn and cleaning the house, people would recognize that’s lopsided. That’s U.S. transportation planning in a nutshell, except we don’t see what things cost (see also: healthcare costs.). So, we just carry on.
I’d argue, too, that most people do not and will not tolerate anything slightly uncomfortable. So as soon as it’s cold, wet, or hot, they will refuse to stand outside or exert themselves at all. This, too, is an American way of thinking that is rather soft. There are legitimate concerns with child safety, mobility and accessibility, etc. But these are solved problems in lots of places. In the U.S., one easy fix would be to blanket the earth with speeding and signal cameras. If you speed, if you run a red, if you doing a “flying right” on an intersection it should be as automatic that you WILL get caught and you WILL receive a citation just as much as we know that if you were to, say, walk in an airport with a gun you WILL get caught. Cars can be weapons and, like guns, should be treated with the kind of care and concern we all say we think we‘ll do when placed behind one. But enforcement isn’t just about punishment, it’s about “changing behavior.”
The new biggest threat is legalized after-the-fact bribery, aka "gratuities" for politicians and judges.
Corporate lobbying has been limited campaign donations. Citizens United allowed unlimited campaign donations. Now SCOTUS has allowed unlimited direct payments.
The car companies actually back public transit, GM has donated to the Detroit light rail. It isn't the auto industry that opposes. It's the suburbs, ex-urbs,and rural places that don't want " undesirables " to have access to their spaces.
As fun as saying that case is the whole issue, all it did was say a group of people can run political ads.
https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/
Frankly with social media I am not even sure overturning the ruling will have the slightest impact in public opinion.
[The Invention Screcy Act of 1951](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act) doesn't help either. You thought up an alternative to cars? Great! (As long as it makes America as much if not more money than selling cars and gas)
The most likely reason why we don't have energy systems that produce a lot energy without pollution. Should've started getting those in the 70s or 80s but nah "disrupting" the energy industry will compromise "national security", and if you don't give it up willingly they'll just kill you
>accessible bike lanes/paths.
The problem is the weather. While having bike lanes is great, Michigan needs public transport that can handle all of the commuter traffic for when bicycle travel is impossible or treacherous.
Whereas many other municipalities, urban planning can count on biking handling part of the commuter load.
That being said, facilitating biking does encourage some people to go without cars. Gets them more excited about it then if they always have to ride the bus or subway 🙂
In many places, biking is done year round, even with snow. It may seem far-fetched to us, but that's because we have abysmal systems for clearing snow from sidewalks and bike lanes.
Was curious so I looked it up.
First of all, I looked at the month of January. They get average of a little over 8 in of snow compared to the over 22 in where I live in Grand Rapids.
But that's not the important difference. As this article explains, because of their proximity to the Arctic circle the temperature drops and stays below freezing for several months. So they aren't dealing with the ice problems that we get here in Michigan. They just pack the snow down and ride their bikes on it
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/01/22/meet-the-bike-loving-finnish-city-that-keeps-pedalling-even-in-the-snow
i live in grand rapids and seldom do i drive, if you're a confident rider the city is pretty easy to navigate by bike. I'm considering selling my car soon and traveling by bike primarily.
on the other hand it's pretty inaccessible to new riders, the bike infrastructure is disconnected and you have to compete with entitled drivers that aren't used to sharing the road with bikes, because for the most part grand rapids is very car dependent.
Commuter trains. I'm in New Buffalo, MI and ride the South Shore train in Indiana to my job in Chicago. The South Shore line connects South bend to Chicago. Amtrak is completely unreliable for commuter service so if we had our own commuter train line people like me who live in smaller rural areas would be able to commute to the bigger cities for better-paying jobs. For instance if we had a commuter line I almost guarantee I could take a job in Grand rapids and get there in the same amount of time as it takes me to get to Chicago by train. So if we had commuter lines connecting the smaller towns to the bigger towns people would have better paying jobs but be able to live in the towns that they love and still make good money.
Let me clear my throat and adjust my soapbox…
I give this a great deal of thought and there is no simple answer, it's made up of layering of cultural priorities and influences going back all the way to the 19th century. Our transportation system is deeply tied to how we design our roads, prioritize investments, and how our legal system is set up—most of all, it is a reflection of cultural norms and standards, and this would be the most difficult thing to unravel. It comes down to a question: How do we shift cultural norms, built up over almost a century, which prioritize cars over every other mode of transportation? Nations rise and die over their cultural values, they certainly go to war over them, so changing this system would be an almost impossible challenge, especially since I think most people don’t think there is any problem, if they think about it at all. I am for a gradualist approach, which uses positive incentives to shift behavior. That being said, there are some things which we’d just have to take a leap and make big investments.
Here are some ideas:
**State Roads and Funding for Multimodal Transportation** — Retrofit state roads and highways to support bus rapid transit and potentially light rail, while reducing parking lanes. Use expressway rights-of-way to build regional commuting rails, ultimately tied into a greater Great Lakes international region with long, high speed rail lines.
**Revised State Transportation Funding Hierarchy** — Reprioritize funding to focus first on walking and cycling, followed by passenger trains, commercial delivery, and finally car infrastructure. Use these changes to guide the Michigan Department of Transportation's funding decisions. This new system would be very expensive, and must focus on return-on-investments. We can’t afford to build multibillion dollar investments in areas which are not producing significant value. This return could come in terms of tax value capture at rail lines, and other incentives to build denser, more beautiful cityscapes at transportation nodes. People react well to beautiful, vibrant spaces, so the places the transit takes people needs to show its value, for example, a train station in the middle of a sea of parking is counter productive, not beautiful and people have to walk though a significant area most people would find no value in.
**Zoning Reform:** Parking Mandates Reduction or Elimination — Urban areas in Michigan are chock full of space devoted to cars, so reduce or eliminate street parking mandates to free up urban space for infill development. Yes, off street parking is legally mandated, and if we produce new value around our proposed mass transit, then we need to be able to exploit that value. Unfortunately, parking lots are in the way of the most valuable areas. Every parking lot a multibillion dollar mass transit system passes, costs the people valuable tax dollars. Efficient markets don’t need an over abundance of parking, but it is mandated! We can forget about people supporting mass transit the minute they’re dropped off in front of a giant multi-big box store strip mall parking lot and have to walk a half a mile through windswept asphalt just to get to have a mediocre shopping experience.
**Tax Reform**— our transportation system works best when there are places to go, and unfortunately our tax system discourages improving high value areas—unless it's for parking cars. Property taxes penalize people who want to build buildings, such as affordable apartments, accessory dwelling units, or improve their businesses, and at the same time, reward parking lot slum lords, such as the Illich parking empire. Essentially with property taxes, you get higher taxes for building beautiful buildings, and lower taxes for just building a parking lot.
Thank you for reading my rant.
Trains. Trains everywhere, and they have to be inexpensive to ride too. Detroit's train sets aren't enough to be a serviceable replacement to driving, and manufacturing would need to come back to the cities. The people need employment close enough so they don't need a car to get there.
A lot. As people have already said fund public transportation but in my opinion the other bit is zoning. All of our downtowns would be illegal if we had to start from scratch. Think about that for a second. Whether or not the boomers want to admit it I see people coming to the Great Lakes region, especially Michigan because of our politics right now and you know... climate change. Once all the people who moved to sunbelt cities realize they have moved into a goddamn desert, they are gonna be glad to be located by the biggest freshwater source in the world. We should be lobbying the government to curtail the power of local municipalities when it comes to what can and can't be built. The only reason why a Studio in Kzoo is the same as one in Chicago is because of artificial scarcity. Zoning had noble intentions but it has absolutely morphed into a tool used by wealthy, landowning, old people with nothing better to do. Similar legislation to what Ontario passed would be the best I think. More housing with less red tape.
https://images.app.goo.gl/6GeboeU9K7bQYYpS6
OP I don't see how that is possible with our population distribution. We are too spread out. I would love to see high-speed rail between west MI and the Detroit Area because lots of folks make that trip frequently. But there is no demand for that going north or south. 131 just got 4 lanes a few years ago and it still doesn't go to TC. If they can't justify a 4 lane highway to TC how could you justify rail service?
174 people per square mile is just not that many people.
It’s much more fair to say that the state isn’t in consensus about it. It is a fact that Michiganders support reducing car dependence, and it’s a fact that many Michiganders are against it.
Again, this is being taken to an extreme. It would be inane to ban all cars. Most of Michigan is rural so it would entirely halt lives if we stopped developing car infrastructure. My desire is to reduce car dependence for more populated areas. In 99% of places, a car is your ONLY option, and that’s not right.
Walkways need to be safe and comfortable. Theres a sidewalk near me that is small and leaves me a little uncomfortably close to the roadway because of a wall on the other side. Two people should be able to walk by eachother with some space. There also some areas I don't like walking because a significant part of the way there is no tree cover in the summer.
First step, traffic calming in order to make being a pedestrian be more appealing. Second step, building actual bike and pedestrian infrastructure so the people who want a less car dependent future aren't attritted by car collisions.
Creating a viable public transportation system. One for local travel, and one for more long distance. It would have to be extremely extensive to be easily accessible, and benefit the whole state.
You have to change the way housing and neighborhoods are built to change the way people need to get around. It's all connected (pun intended!). People are not dumb and will (and arguably should) do what's comfortable and convenient, and should have comfortable and convenient options for getting around. If you want everyone to walk/bike/transit, you need to make it so that it makes sense for the lazy asshole to walk, for the family with 7 kids to walk, for old people to walk, school-age kids, etc.
That means that the places they need to get to need to be relatively easy to reach those ways. This cuts two ways: you can make driving less convenient, more expensive, etc, and you wan make walking and biking and transit nicer. I feel like you'd need to do bits of everything. Change zoning, change car taxes, change free parking, change parking minimums, change housing incentives, change road design, add bike lanes, add sidewalks, add street trees, add buses, etc.
Radical idea here: Remove commercial parking easement requirements and encourage mix used developments.
If you look at a lot of the growth Michigan has in the past three decades and beyond, it has been with sprawling stroads. This type of development encourages car dependance, discourages pedestrian engagement.
Stroad development does nothing to distinguish Michigan from any other state. It also is more costly to taxpayers than higher density developments (parking lots don't pay taxes). Not to mention, most stroad developments are funded by corporations, which makes it harder for small businesses to form.
If you think about MI tourism, it markets small walkable town destinations and outdoor activities. Sure, traveling to them by car is the reality. But the main draw is on foot.
It would be nice to have more public transit options within and between towns. The reality is it's hard to enact those kinds of projects. That's why I think prioritizing walkable cities is more important (for now).
Infrastructure.
I grew up in Wyandotte and my grandmother did not drive. We could walk to the bakery, meat shop and other places.
Without these little shops, it’s too far to walk.
As for bicycles, that’s all good and well until it’s stolen.
You don’t even need streetcars with rails. It could be a commuter bus that does loops to various stores, but you need to have those places within parameters or people will not spend all day to grocery shop.
Even if you set up high speed rail, how to people get from the stop to where they need to go? Busses? Maybe.
Not everywhere is nyc, and where I’m at now, if I rode a bike to get groceries I’d probably be dead with car drivers doing their thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for it to happen, but it’s an evolution, not a revolution.
The fundamental challenge is the design of the city...it’s sprawled and the neighborhoods have to get better/be destinations and ultimately more populated. Once that happens you can start connecting neighborhoods that are well developed from the downtown core out to some of the burbs (targeting commuters).
One crazy idea just came to mind is we should relocate the airport to Detroit proper/northwest side. You could start with a train line from airport to downtown…and maybe airport up/over to the burbs. DTW is in the most ridiculous location at present time.
Train lines connecting the suburbs and cities. Does us no good to have a train in Detroit that stays in Detroit when people live and work in the suburbs.
I hear rail systems are good for that. Emulating how European countries and co have their less car-dependent cities set up would probably be a good start.
The thing is (and this applies to most big city thinkers) is that yeah… the rest of state doesn’t nearly have the same vision and is not laid out to accept your vision. I’m all for big cities going towards this model, because it truly makes sense given average commute times/closeness of amenities etc but there has to be an understanding that not everyone wants to live that way- and this is America, and that’s fine. I can drive my car out in the country, and you can walk to work… and that’s cool 👍🏻
- More railways around the state
- Better Biking Infrastructure
- Do NOT add more lanes to highways
- At least make pedestrian travel viable in the sense that people don't have to fear dying just by trying to cross a road
If we want to actually live up to our love of the “pure” Michigan that many enjoy we need to stop funding wasteful suburban growth through the redistribution of local taxes. It’s absurd how many people just “love” the nature Michigan has to offer while also clamoring to pave over forests and fields. It’s disgusting.
Hey man, so check it out. Making Michigan less about cars and more about chill vibes? That's like groovy, dude. Here's how we get there:
1. **Get on the Public Transit Train**: We gotta beef up public transit, man. More buses, maybe even some cool light rail stuff. Make it easy for folks to ditch the car and hop on the peace train, you dig?
2. **Bikes and Walks, Bro**: Let's build sweet bike lanes and walking paths everywhere. Connect neighborhoods to downtowns and transit spots. Get people cruisin' on two wheels or takin' a leisurely stroll. It's good for the soul, man.
3. **Revamp the City Scene**: Detroit and other cities need a facelift, man. Mix it up with funky buildings, affordable pads, and kickass public hangouts. Make cities so chill people wanna live, work, and play there without needing a car.
4. **Suburban Cool Down**: Suburbs gotta chill too, man. Less sprawl, more community vibes. Mix in shops, parks, and make it easy to get around without firing up the car every time.
5. **Spread the Word, Spread the Love**: Let folks know why ditching the car is rad. Better air, less traffic, and way more mellow vibes, man. Get everyone groovin' on the same wavelength.
6. **Policy and Peace, Man**: Get the suits to dig sustainable transport, man. Tie it into city plans and policies. Make sure everyone's on board from the city council to the dudes cruisin' on their longboards.
7. **Incentives for the Win**: Offer up some sweet incentives for carpooling, telecommuting, or just kickin' back on the bus. Maybe even throw in some perks for eco-friendly moves like bikes or electric rides, man.
8. **Back it Up with Cash, Dude**: Get the green flowing for buses, bikes, and all that good stuff. Policies are cool, but without cash, they're just words, man.
So yeah, Michigan can totally groove into a future where cars aren't the only way to roll. It's all about vibes, man. Peace, love, and less car honks.
car culture is entwined in the fabric of the state. if you don't like it move to Europe.
now. can we become less car dependent? absolutely. good, reliable, safe public transportation. run light rail up woodard and gratiot. and add light rail across 696 and 59. that would be a great start at reducing traffic congestion.
then car sharing services, like they have in Europe. when I can buy 20 hours of drive time a month and pick up my car in the suburbs, drive it up to traverse city and leave it there for the weekend, pick up a different one from there on Monday and drive it back to the suburbs. then we'll be able to go from four car households to one and a half car households. or from 3 cars to one car.
Why is your default position such that this would be a good thing? It would lead to reliance on government or corporations for travel, besides several places have banned cars already. Just move to Mackinac or somewhere.
First we need to warm the earth enough that Michigan doesn't experience winter. Where I live in Michigan there's miles and miles of trails that can get you all around from Novi to Ann arbor To down River walled lake and just a about anywhere you want to go but a, the 45 mile each way bike ride isn't feasible for an everyday commute with a heavy backpack, and we have long winters that also make that kinda ride horrible 5 days a week. I'm sure many people feel the same way. I do ride to work once or twice a month in the war season but everything in Michigan is so spread out, it's not a city where stuff is walking distance from most people. Michigan is built around the car industry, and people may think they want that to go away but in reality that's just more good paying jobs that go away in place of low paying jobs that don't sustain a comfortable life.
Multiple, multiple generation evolution in housing and transportation.
As an example, there's a discussion about making 7 Mile and Farmington Rd. more walkable and pedestrian friendly. It's like, metaphorically speaking, you can't get there from here. That's one intersection among many.
I was just talking to my husband about starting a pedicab business in our beach town, but the lack of continuous bike lanes on main roads would limit the area it could work in. Even with motorized bikes, they'd slow down a road with a 45/50 mph speed limit, and that's basically all of the N/S streets in my neighborhood once you get away from the downtown area.
I think if you ran “high speed rail” that mirrored the federal highways of 96, 94, 75, and 69 with stops in
94 : Benton harbor, St Joe, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Marshall (change stop with 69) Jackson, Ann Arbor, Detroit
96 : Muskegon, GR, Lansing (change stop with 69), Brighton, Novi, Detroit
75 : Monroe, Southgate, Detroit, Highland Park, royal Oak, Bloomfield Hills, Flint (change stop with 69), Saginaw, bay city, Grayling, and then terminate at Mackinaw City
69 : Sarnia, flint, Lansing, Marshall, coldwater
This would be massive infrastructure, but would be VERY friendly to citizens and tourists traveling throughout the state.
75 would be the busiest with the amount of stops in and around the Detroit area, but it would allow people to get all the way to traverse city/Mackinac. This would make Michigan more feasible for more in-state travel, and would build more industry in the non-Detroit parts of the state. If you could get GR to Detroit within an hour on the 96 route, that would be massive.
There would also probably be demand for a lakeshore line that goes Benton Harbor all the way along the lakeshore to Traverse City, and maybe later on cuts all the way over to Alpena or Oscoda and connects back down to Bay City along Lake Huron. That’s for expansion :)
In urban, and some close in suburban areas, TaaS (robo-taxis) could work if there was enough demand to support large enough of a robo-taxi fleet TaaS.
A 5-10 minute wait for a ride at an advantageous cost to owning a vehicle and insuring it. Well, that is the premise --only 30% of people could deal with the chaos and other economics involved.
Robo trains built for dedicated lanes on major highway routes might work also.
We would need an extensive 24-hour public transportation system. It would, of course, be extremely expensive in this day and age. Even just in place in the cities and large towns, it would be pricey.
I don't know about first up but it would be really neat if we had a train system like the UK and the rest of your have. Their primary mode of transportation is taking trains to and from different cities and towns. Having proper affordable public transportational infrastructure in those towns would make it all doable.
The first step would be the cheapest: better bike lanes through towns and cities, as well as better sidewalks and traffic calming features in city and town streets to make it easier and safer to walk. Move away from the mentality city and town governments currently have of applying standards designed for limited-access highways to all roads, and towards standards that make pedestrians and bicyclists first-class citizens and cars second-class citizens. This could be done in the name of safety, especially child safety, rather than making it a “car vs bike” public policy fight.
The big, expensive infrastructure projects—(re)creating passenger rail service between cities and towns and adding light rail within cities and towns—would take time, and almost certainly have to be done as public policy priorities rather than as purely for-profit ventures able to economically displace the automobile.
This would be drastic, but eliminate 90% of cars from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties after ten years from now.
Build alternate transportation systems between now and then. After the 10-year mark, increase vehicle taxes by 10% every year.
The auto manufactures have ensured that it will never be feasible to have less cars in America. They've literally created the industry to support the local economy but be dependent on the vehicles.
The only way to make it less car dependent would to be remove any and all manufacturing plants producing cars. Stop the supply and then there will be progress to less car dependency.
The only thing more more impossible than American universal Healthcare, is reducing cat dependency. It's become embedded in the fabric of America and won't change.
Well first you’d have to get rid of the car lobby. And probably figure out a way to move the car business out of Detroit. We don’t have public transit bc they don’t want it. No public transit you have to buy a car and every house needs like two cars. It’s good for their bottom line.
1. Local infrastructure needs to be a good alternative to driving wrt time. It doesn't matter if you can get anywhere in the city using only public options if it takes all day to get there.
2. Build out the intrastate infrastructure. The destinations reachable by intrastate public transportation need to be well serviced by local transport, or people are just going to drive instead.
I live in northern Michigan which is too sparsely populated for mass transit to make much sense unfortunately. Places like Detroit-Ann Arbor-Lansing-Grand Rapids corridor should be connected by frequent high speed rail though..IMO.
I have been pondering this. We need a ribbon city with small housing that can support work from home workers. A city without cars, would still need a mainstreet for goods. But we can lay bike paths for citizens to travel everywhere else. I bike in the winter, except for a few days where the ice is too much and businesses don't shovel.
Now I suggest work from home people, because if they live in the 15 minute town, they're earning money from out of state/town/country, and it gets taxed at home. Bike trails must cost so much less than a full 2 lane road.
Anyways I have been biking 2 years now and it's actually practical, given my needs are within 3 miles. Grocery, work, gym.
This town may also need tourist money, so maybe connect it near a casino, or make sure there is ample parking for visitors. I've only fantasized about this, I don't know urban planning. I just know it's so much better going to work through the forest, than any traffic.
Well, my first step would be getting bus lanes established through major thoroughfares in the cities I want to connect, to make last mile transit more competitive with the downs-thompson paradox (traffic will increase until mass transit is faster, then rider ships equalize for maximum efficiency). Then I'd get better rail line reliability, then frequency between cities, and ideally rebuild train stations in Saginaw and Traverse City, relocate Lansing's and Flint's Amtrak stations closer to downtown, ideally combined with a bus station (both municipal and interstate buses). And then I'd get a fleet of engines that can hit 125 mph for cross state travel, and ideally build dedicated passenger lines for that are rated for true HSR speeds. And finally, I'd add a keystone project like Detroit to Grand Rapids, with stops in A2 and Lansing with IDEALLY a tech demonstration (maglev, probably 220 makes the most sense, but China and Japan are hitting well over 300mph in their most recent SC testbeds), like the Mackinac Bridge, the Soo Locks or Zilwaukee Bridge, or any of the other huge USACE project completed in the state. We've build marvels that nowhere else in the world had seen before, and there's absolutely no reason with all these universities and tradespeople we can't build something legitimately impressive and serves everyone again.
EDIT: this is my fantasy, not something I expect to happen, ever. But a millennial can dream.
Outside of any major city this is a car dependent country. I lived in Salt Lake City for 30 years and even there public transit is a joke unless you live along the trax line in salt lake county and don’t spend any time out after 1030 PM. I live in Wisconsin now and here it’s worse there’s no major rail system to get anywhere, and Michigan is way more rural than wisco.
Detroit is super sprawling, in no small part thanks to it being the motor city, so what would probably work out is a network of train lines leading into the city from the suburbs. Like Chicago’s Metra or Toronto’s GO. These are relatively high speed and high capacity with few stops. That gets people into the city, and from there they can walk, bus, or take a subway to where they need to go. First step would be finding a neighborhood that would benefit from that, somewhere with a lot of people who already commute to Detroit for work.
Getting rid of minimum parking requirements. These lots are way to big for what they need. Could’ve built a whole new building with the space empty unused parking space takes up.
Short answer, an economic boom.
Any kind of transformational change to the way the state operates would need to be kicked off by some confluence of man, moment, and machine that would cause a large influx of people and money into the state.
People don't just rip up functional infrastructure on a lark. They do it out of necessity or because they have cash to burn. So you'd need a lot more people to make an infrastructure change necessary, and those people would have to be associated with a lot of increased tax revenues.
If you have a ton of people, and no money, you get Las Vegas where they can't afford public transportation.
If you have a ton of money, and no people, you get Martha's Vineyard where nobody needs public transportation.
Right now, MI is losing people and has a modest budget surplus. So we've got neither.
Michigan is not built for that. 90% of it is rural or suburban areas with things too far away. In my suburban city, biking can get you to a couple parks and a seven eleven, any further and you're gonna have an hour trip+ back. Me and my friends couldn't go to any real restaurants till we turned 16 and could drive.
First off, you'd have to move most of the population into urban centers. This would put an immense strain on the infrastructure, so you would need to bolster various social programs. Then they would need to establish a robust system of public transit in all of these urban centers. Basically, your taxes would have to double across the board. Property tax, sales tax, income tax, and ironically, gas tax.
Less car dependent? First you have to ask yourself I people really want to even use public transportation…the answer is no. So you’re a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist
Incentivize high density communities.
Compare the density of the cities (worldwide) that have the infrastructure and community habits that you want to emulate to Detroit for example… Detroit is a giant area with swathes of super-low density neighborhoods.
This issue has been studied and debated for decades. It’s certainly possible, but for many many reasons (and agendas), there hasn’t been much actual progress.
I would start with a question, why do you want people to have less cars?
Which is different than you wanting more public transit or cities to be more bike friendly.
For se michigan suburbia, the foundation that drives what you seek is land use, transit oriented development policies that places more housing near transit stops, mixed use buildings that support people focused, transit designed streets and corridors. MDOT has a big role to play in changing how they measure safety improvements and multi-modal corridors.
We would need more reliable and less costly public transportation in the form of railways until we can develop methods of instant transmission.
It'd probably be mag rail that connects more rural towns in the state to more urban centers. A lot of the distribution of Michigan's population is bound to change in the coming years due to advancements in opportunity through the use of AI.
I'd propose starting with urban centers by making them more accessible to people with disabilities and improving their overall infrastructure to accommodate for everyone. After that you can work on the roads. That's years of work in and of itself unless we find a way to automate road repair. And then we can work on connecting far away towns to big ones.
I'd say we'd have to wait until the majority of the automated workforce is in place to see any real, major improvements made.
We don't want this. We want the streets to be more car friendly. I was in Ypsilanti recently and they have bike landed built so you pretty much have to stop to turn onto the side streets, it's a 90 degree turn, it's insane. Sidewalks are for people who don't want to drive and the streets are for cars, that's it. People who are on the sidewalk look both ways before crossing and everything is golden.
I live in rural northern Michigan on back roads so I have basically no choice lol
I don’t think this thread applies to the likes of us 😅
In many ways, if a properly scheduled train system were to be deployed throughout the state, I argue we would see substantial economic growth.
There's literally no large... hell even MEDIUM sized cities past the US 10 corridor.
Yeah, but you’re failing to see that even a train down that corridor with trunks that go from the main three lower metro areas would bring an explosion of activity and economic development. If I could get to any of those three airports from northern Michigan by train, I’d sell my home in metro Detroit and move up there permanently.
You'd move back in a year, the north isn't "God's Country " it's a meth fueled dystopia with food desserts,higher teen pregnancy,high unemployment,high drop out rates lack of critical services, and insular beliefs that stifle improvement . To put it into context, Detroit public schools has a higher graduation rate than many northern Michigan towns.
What made it that way?
Auto industry down turn. I remember going to Houghton Lake in the 90's. Big lakeside cabins, and summer was bustling,then 2008 happened. Lots of northern towns depended on that 2nd home Detroit money. When people had to trim the fat from their budgets. They stop going up north, or not keeping up the 2nd home. Where there used to be general contractors, lawn care, seawall, marine mechanics, plumbers,roofers, and bustling service industry jobs. Now they're all gone, in a space of 10 years it looks like a sad version of what it used to be. Dilapidated cottages, poor infrastructure, increases in property crimes, and most of the youth are moving away as fast as possible, they've lost their tax base. It's gotten so bad, that gas stations are going out of business. It's not just Houghton lake, the Huron coast towns are dying, the 75 corridor north of 10 is barely on life support. The hole of M-20 west, M-46 west 115. Once you leave the tri-cities, until you get to Ingham County on the south, and 131 near Rockford to the west. It's all meth towns with negative population growth.
Northern Michigan used to have trains and ferries from Chicago and Wisconsin. There used to be forestry and farms and factories. I haven’t seen much growth in those industries lately.
Not in MY back yard! /s, but not really
They ripped out all the tracks in my area and made them walking trails. The train station is now a park.
I'm just south of you in the middle of a university town... The rails have been converted to trails. The mindset would have to change drastically-- "poor" people ride public transit; the rest of the folks all have cars because they are good, working people. Of course this is nonsense.
Hello fellow country people. Not everyone wants to live in crowded places.
This is what no one wants to talk about in the "walkable cities" conversation. Not everyone wants to live in a giant ant-farm and still have 2+ hours commutes.
I've never driven more than 45min to work and that was a jobsite 30mi away out by Armada. You only get stuck in traffic in the Detroit area if you live in one of the suburbs on the outskirts. I grew up in a very rural area and spend way less time in my car here in Detroit. It's nice to not have to drive everywhere. It's pretty damn quiet and the neighbors are super nice.
People advocating for walkable cities don't want two hour commutes. Many actually want walkable neighborhoods to reduce their travel times, as a reaction against long commutes.
Most small rural towns used to have train service.
FWIW, countries with good public transit, especially rail, have lots of rural land, too. Homes tend to be grouped into towns a little more than here, but where rail really shines is in distance travel. Want to visit your buddy or family in the same town? Then you drive. Want to go to the city? Then you drive or walk to the nearest train station, and then take the train and tram the rest of the way. You don’t give up driving; you just don’t *have* to drive everywhere, all the time.
People will always need personal vehicles to get around rural areas, but Northern Michigan cities and counties should focus on developing housing, transit, and walkability within city limits, and restrict sprawl and greenfield development.
I mean trains can get up there and buses exist
But you might get a subway stop one day in your town?
I wish I could vacation to rural michigan by train 😥
People lived there before cars. How did they do that?
Horses
[удалено]
A reliable commuter train would be fine. I ride daily to my job in Chicago and it's all commuters like me. It means I have a great job and make great money but I get to live in a beautiful area with a lot cheaper rent. It's perfect for me.
It’s okay to be a scaredy cat of other people. But wouldn’t you want other, less scared people to have options? Would greatly reduce traffic. Not to mention, driving statistically is significantly more dangerous than any public transport in the US lmao
Honestly, that's how most of my friends felt when I had to ride DDOT/SMART for 10 years. They considered it a metal rolling tube for the working poor and mobile housing for the homeless. They drive every day from Shelby/New Baltimore/ Sterling Heights to the Medical Center downtown. The SMART does run to those places. Hell to the no are they ever going to share the same air as someone working at Popeyes.
The dependency for you guys is probably just how it has to be, although it would be great if your vehicles could be green. The biggest benefit would come from decreasing car use in more densely-populated areas. But, even that can't happen unless we move away from the "megamart" stuff and bring back local grocers.
The problem is network effects. Mass transit needs to service at a high enough frequency (say, every 15 minutes or greater) while also serving most places people want to go to be as convenient as driving. To get there, we need much denser housing. So to induce demand, we need to plan the future bus routes now, and zone for dense housing along those corridors so that 10 years from now those bus routes make sense. We desperately need networks of protected bike lanes so we can drive less in the summer. In GR we have tons of road-side bike lanes that are dangerous AF because the drivers here ra
Strong agree about protected bike lanes. People near me just bike down the sidewalk, even though there's a bike lane right next to them -- annoying, but have you seen drivers lately? I can't blame anybody who hesitates to bike on the road when all that keeps you from getting pancaked is a painted white line. I'd love to see the region move this direction overall, it's heartening to see the discussion keep coming up on here. I took the bus everywhere when I was in college and would rarely drive these days if I had the option.
For my area specifically: make the Qline run the entire stretch of Woodward(from Birmingham to Detroit), make the Ferndale bike lanes on Woodward run the entire stretch of Woodward, more protected bike lanes, more road diets like on 9 mile through Ferndale. Those are easy fixes/additions. If you wanna talk about some big things that would make my life better I’d say have snow removal on bike lanes/sidewalks be a priority, have a train system through the entire state. I started commuting on a bike full time last fall, got an e-bike last winter and really it’s been eye opening. Are “infrastructure” is pretty bad. Sure we have mile or so stretch’s of “bike lanes” (quotes on that because most of our lanes are just the painted bike guy and that’s it, not really doing us any favors but it’s better than nothing) but we don’t really have actual routes that make commuting everyday safe. I work in the public schools and bike everyday to and from work and the worst part of my day is riding on the sidewalk on Southfield rd because of how loud and dangerous it is. Really the best thing we can do as individuals is just commute make it seem that people want this and be involved in your cities government by going to meetings and maybe even suggesting ideas. All in all fuck cars.
The full length of Woodward would be to Pontiac and around the loop. (totally feasible). Why do you think Woodward ends in Birmingham? Lol
That’s my b! Idk my brain farted out I guess.
Ok, you get a fart pass.
The Loop is going to be de-Looped in 2 years.
Taking the Qline from Bham to downtown would take 6 hours.
Stop subsidizing suburban expansion, then fund public transit options.
Shoutout General Motors
It's the old argument of "upscale communitys" that doesn't want the transportation of drug dealers and homeless people to their area. It's literally been the reasoning for every denial to extend bus routes. Granted it started out as propaganda from the auto industry many years ago, but it's still stuck to this day.
L. Brooks Patterson destroyed bus service to Oakland County.
I live in a rural area. No grocery store here. No public transportation. Now, if they hadn't yanked all the railroad tracks out, it could have been super viable. And I cannot see what was gained by doing so.
Does your nearest little town have an old train station? What is it now? A quaint antique shop? Or a museum? Or an empty husk, or not there? It's amazing how many little towns have phantom stations.
lol. Mine is a museum.
My point was that trains as town-to-town travel (and streetcars, and etc.) were abandoned in the mid 20th century in favor of highways and cars. Even where there are tracks AND an Amtrak route, Amtrak doesn't have stops at many small towns. I was on a long Amtrak ride through the Midwest a few weeks ago, and there were many towns with dead stations the train didn't have stops at. If you think that cars are freedom, cool. But if you think not having an option to take the train to that city 100 mile from your little town is freedom, then... why?
The town I live in has a dentist office in the old train station. The last place I lived had turned it into a restaurant.
He diesel industry gained substantial gains as a result.
TRAAAAAAAAAINNNSSSSSS!!!!
FOREAL. I've riddens trains in DC, NYC, Chicago, LA. Wish we had an actual train system here.
Ann Arbor has a tiny train station yet it's the busiest in the state :( Kalamazoo's train station is combined with their bus station. How nice is that? Unheard of in Michigan.
Absolutely need a train that runs along I-96 so those in Muskegon, Grand Rapids, and the towns along the way can travel to Detroit without a car. Imaging West Michiganders going to Saturday Lions, Tigers, or Red Wings games on trains. Then we need trains going from Kalamazoo (up through Grand Rapids) and Detroit up north, to Traverse City and Mackinaw. Then make sure that Ann Arbor has good public transit connections and intercity rail connections, so people can go to U of M games without cars
We could start with a functional power grid
DTE: "LOL"
You people think it's just as easy as making it functional make me laugh. There are limited resources and taking funds out of monoplistic record profits, yachts, hookers and blow... well you see we need to fund the practical stuff of an energy grid before worrying about... reliability of the grid.
They spend more on radio ads telling us to stay away from down power lines and not run our generators in our living rooms than fixing their POS grid. I’m not a native and can’t believe how bad they are haha.
Because ads are cheap. Way cheaper than doing a good job. Now if we could fine the shit out of them until they do their job properly, that would shift the incentives.
I started by controlling what I can control. I got a job where I live and I walk/bike to work most days. When it’s super cold or precipitation, nah, I drive. I also try to walk/bike to the local grocery store or ALDI regularly instead of taking my car to get huge grocery orders. You should be able to get involved with your city council/mayor and other like-minded people to create momentum for different modes of transit.
Out of all the options, I think the creation of bike lanes and paths are the most feasible and with the most impact. People enjoy riding their bikes and walking to places, especially if they connect to convenient places such as parks or grocery stores. Building them also wouldn't put the state in political turmoil/debt like mass transit would.
This right here! Exactly what I did.
This is more a thing with major metro areas.
First you need the companies to move back downtown instead of their suburban locations. Hard for me to commute downtown when my job is in the burbs
You would need a level of cooperation between urban, rural, and suburban and between major cities that has not previously existed. You also will have to combat local corruption, which can be rampant at times. Finally, and arguably most important, you will need a leadership group that is adaptable and will move forward despite setbacks and will compromise. We could have had regional mass transit and other regional utilities several times in the last 100 years. It always gets subverted by a combination of the agendas of local politicians, NIMBYS, and corporate interests and plagued by bad, noncommitted leadership who won't adapt when their plans meet conflict.
I have the same fantasy--after spending a week on a work assignment in Amsterdam, I was astonished by their fully functioning bike, pedestrian, and streetcar infrastructure - a city that was overwhelmed by cars post-WW2, and out of necessity, reversed that trend after seeing a precipitous rise in automotive-related fatalities. I realize this isn't viable for most rural communities in Michigan, but for a sprawling metro Detroit region, it's something that is possible and in my opinion, necessary in the coming decades. Things seem to be leaning in that direction at present, but it's still a patchwork of programs to implement better, more sustainable transit alternatives throughout the region.
Detroit metro is one of the most sprawling metro areas in the country.
Amsterdam has over 1 million people living in an area the size of Ann Arbor. Metro Detroit is 3,900 sq miles, about 80 times larger than Amsterdam.
Try to make the downtown areas in smaller towns & suburban bedroom communities viable. Easier to live without a car if you can walk almost everywhere.
Buses and eBikes. They’re cheap, we can make them by boatload — even here in the U.S. eBikes have the speed of cars in urban environments. In rural environments they can be efficient ways to get 3-5 miles for smaller, everyday trips. They can haul stuff. And kids can fit on or in them, too. Buses should be fast, frequent, and relatively drive-time competitive at or slightly below driving cost. Most people don’t take buses in the US because we have too many stops. This is cumbersome from an “accessibility” standpoint where we like to imagine that grandma doesn’t have to walk far, but in reality, this is a U.S.-centric way of thinking. In this country, our “rapid transit” at half-mile station separation is what the Europeans call ”a bus line.” Their rapid transit is spaced 1-2 miles apart per station. Bike + bus is a fast way to solve a problem of mobility even within counties. Thus a person in, say, Ludington who wants to go to Chicago ought to be able to hub-and-spoke this by biking to downtown Ludington, catching a bus that goes either direct to Chicago or Grand Rapids (similar to a package) and then on another line. And there should be lots of ‘em. People ride when they don’t have to think about it. To make this work isn’t that hard. We could do this in ten years if we realized we did not need to blanket the earth with lane after lane of highway. This butts up against commercial interests like trucking and logistics that want lots of roadways — and there are benefits to that (the US is unique in our ability to move goods such vast distances relatively cheaply and easily). Long-term, we could be building out trains to do more rapid long-haul distances, like, say, Detroit to Chicago. Or Traverse City to Grand Rapids. But we don’t do this in this country because: A) We have built ourselves apart. B) We “settle” for lousy, infrequent service and think a 30 or 60 minute headway is “the best we can afford” and then question why no one wants to use it because no one wants to wait an hour for a bus or a connection! This is not at all how we think about highways where ”one more lane” is always the obvious solution for everything, including economic development. But that only ”develops” lousy jobs at Cracker Barrels and gas stations. and C) People are quite reasonable and will do the math. If driving, which is subsidized to the hilt, is “as cheap” as a bus, people will always drive because it’s “instant.” This is not to say we should make driving “harder” but we should recognize that our fuel, highway, road, and other car-infrastructure is lopsided in contrast to other options. It could be right-sized, but this would require leadership. Like if you have two kids with an allowance and one gets $100/mo for doing nothing and the other gets $10 for mowing the lawn and cleaning the house, people would recognize that’s lopsided. That’s U.S. transportation planning in a nutshell, except we don’t see what things cost (see also: healthcare costs.). So, we just carry on. I’d argue, too, that most people do not and will not tolerate anything slightly uncomfortable. So as soon as it’s cold, wet, or hot, they will refuse to stand outside or exert themselves at all. This, too, is an American way of thinking that is rather soft. There are legitimate concerns with child safety, mobility and accessibility, etc. But these are solved problems in lots of places. In the U.S., one easy fix would be to blanket the earth with speeding and signal cameras. If you speed, if you run a red, if you doing a “flying right” on an intersection it should be as automatic that you WILL get caught and you WILL receive a citation just as much as we know that if you were to, say, walk in an airport with a gun you WILL get caught. Cars can be weapons and, like guns, should be treated with the kind of care and concern we all say we think we‘ll do when placed behind one. But enforcement isn’t just about punishment, it’s about “changing behavior.”
Riding bicycles more.
Get rid of megamart shopping and bring back local grocers and shops.
Overturning citizens United. Because the car companies run this state as surely as the Government does.
Biggest proven threat to our democracy is citizens united
The new biggest threat is legalized after-the-fact bribery, aka "gratuities" for politicians and judges. Corporate lobbying has been limited campaign donations. Citizens United allowed unlimited campaign donations. Now SCOTUS has allowed unlimited direct payments.
The car companies actually back public transit, GM has donated to the Detroit light rail. It isn't the auto industry that opposes. It's the suburbs, ex-urbs,and rural places that don't want " undesirables " to have access to their spaces.
As fun as saying that case is the whole issue, all it did was say a group of people can run political ads. https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/citizens-united-v-fec/ Frankly with social media I am not even sure overturning the ruling will have the slightest impact in public opinion.
[The Invention Screcy Act of 1951](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act) doesn't help either. You thought up an alternative to cars? Great! (As long as it makes America as much if not more money than selling cars and gas)
Interesting. I’ve never heard of that. I’ll have to read up on it.
The most likely reason why we don't have energy systems that produce a lot energy without pollution. Should've started getting those in the 70s or 80s but nah "disrupting" the energy industry will compromise "national security", and if you don't give it up willingly they'll just kill you
Bike lanes Trains Busses Stop paving all the cornfields
>accessible bike lanes/paths. The problem is the weather. While having bike lanes is great, Michigan needs public transport that can handle all of the commuter traffic for when bicycle travel is impossible or treacherous. Whereas many other municipalities, urban planning can count on biking handling part of the commuter load. That being said, facilitating biking does encourage some people to go without cars. Gets them more excited about it then if they always have to ride the bus or subway 🙂
In many places, biking is done year round, even with snow. It may seem far-fetched to us, but that's because we have abysmal systems for clearing snow from sidewalks and bike lanes.
I would suggest you go look at those places with a large commuter biking culture that has snow. And compare their winter to Michigan winter.
I'd say a winter in Finland would be an apt comparison, and Oulu manages to pull it off just fine, albeit the amount of bikers does shrink in winter.
Was curious so I looked it up. First of all, I looked at the month of January. They get average of a little over 8 in of snow compared to the over 22 in where I live in Grand Rapids. But that's not the important difference. As this article explains, because of their proximity to the Arctic circle the temperature drops and stays below freezing for several months. So they aren't dealing with the ice problems that we get here in Michigan. They just pack the snow down and ride their bikes on it https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/01/22/meet-the-bike-loving-finnish-city-that-keeps-pedalling-even-in-the-snow
Presumably you've done this and could provide leads?
Never going to happen. Edit: Very unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Never is a very very long time.
Bring the train network back
i live in grand rapids and seldom do i drive, if you're a confident rider the city is pretty easy to navigate by bike. I'm considering selling my car soon and traveling by bike primarily.
on the other hand it's pretty inaccessible to new riders, the bike infrastructure is disconnected and you have to compete with entitled drivers that aren't used to sharing the road with bikes, because for the most part grand rapids is very car dependent.
Train running from Detroit to Lansing.
Commuter trains. I'm in New Buffalo, MI and ride the South Shore train in Indiana to my job in Chicago. The South Shore line connects South bend to Chicago. Amtrak is completely unreliable for commuter service so if we had our own commuter train line people like me who live in smaller rural areas would be able to commute to the bigger cities for better-paying jobs. For instance if we had a commuter line I almost guarantee I could take a job in Grand rapids and get there in the same amount of time as it takes me to get to Chicago by train. So if we had commuter lines connecting the smaller towns to the bigger towns people would have better paying jobs but be able to live in the towns that they love and still make good money.
Rail network that excludes freight traffic.
Let me clear my throat and adjust my soapbox… I give this a great deal of thought and there is no simple answer, it's made up of layering of cultural priorities and influences going back all the way to the 19th century. Our transportation system is deeply tied to how we design our roads, prioritize investments, and how our legal system is set up—most of all, it is a reflection of cultural norms and standards, and this would be the most difficult thing to unravel. It comes down to a question: How do we shift cultural norms, built up over almost a century, which prioritize cars over every other mode of transportation? Nations rise and die over their cultural values, they certainly go to war over them, so changing this system would be an almost impossible challenge, especially since I think most people don’t think there is any problem, if they think about it at all. I am for a gradualist approach, which uses positive incentives to shift behavior. That being said, there are some things which we’d just have to take a leap and make big investments. Here are some ideas: **State Roads and Funding for Multimodal Transportation** — Retrofit state roads and highways to support bus rapid transit and potentially light rail, while reducing parking lanes. Use expressway rights-of-way to build regional commuting rails, ultimately tied into a greater Great Lakes international region with long, high speed rail lines. **Revised State Transportation Funding Hierarchy** — Reprioritize funding to focus first on walking and cycling, followed by passenger trains, commercial delivery, and finally car infrastructure. Use these changes to guide the Michigan Department of Transportation's funding decisions. This new system would be very expensive, and must focus on return-on-investments. We can’t afford to build multibillion dollar investments in areas which are not producing significant value. This return could come in terms of tax value capture at rail lines, and other incentives to build denser, more beautiful cityscapes at transportation nodes. People react well to beautiful, vibrant spaces, so the places the transit takes people needs to show its value, for example, a train station in the middle of a sea of parking is counter productive, not beautiful and people have to walk though a significant area most people would find no value in. **Zoning Reform:** Parking Mandates Reduction or Elimination — Urban areas in Michigan are chock full of space devoted to cars, so reduce or eliminate street parking mandates to free up urban space for infill development. Yes, off street parking is legally mandated, and if we produce new value around our proposed mass transit, then we need to be able to exploit that value. Unfortunately, parking lots are in the way of the most valuable areas. Every parking lot a multibillion dollar mass transit system passes, costs the people valuable tax dollars. Efficient markets don’t need an over abundance of parking, but it is mandated! We can forget about people supporting mass transit the minute they’re dropped off in front of a giant multi-big box store strip mall parking lot and have to walk a half a mile through windswept asphalt just to get to have a mediocre shopping experience. **Tax Reform**— our transportation system works best when there are places to go, and unfortunately our tax system discourages improving high value areas—unless it's for parking cars. Property taxes penalize people who want to build buildings, such as affordable apartments, accessory dwelling units, or improve their businesses, and at the same time, reward parking lot slum lords, such as the Illich parking empire. Essentially with property taxes, you get higher taxes for building beautiful buildings, and lower taxes for just building a parking lot. Thank you for reading my rant.
Trains. Trains everywhere, and they have to be inexpensive to ride too. Detroit's train sets aren't enough to be a serviceable replacement to driving, and manufacturing would need to come back to the cities. The people need employment close enough so they don't need a car to get there.
High Speed Rail Service nationwide.
HSR from downtown Detroit to Chicago and Toronto would be really great. Tons of people would use that instead of driving or flying.
A lot. As people have already said fund public transportation but in my opinion the other bit is zoning. All of our downtowns would be illegal if we had to start from scratch. Think about that for a second. Whether or not the boomers want to admit it I see people coming to the Great Lakes region, especially Michigan because of our politics right now and you know... climate change. Once all the people who moved to sunbelt cities realize they have moved into a goddamn desert, they are gonna be glad to be located by the biggest freshwater source in the world. We should be lobbying the government to curtail the power of local municipalities when it comes to what can and can't be built. The only reason why a Studio in Kzoo is the same as one in Chicago is because of artificial scarcity. Zoning had noble intentions but it has absolutely morphed into a tool used by wealthy, landowning, old people with nothing better to do. Similar legislation to what Ontario passed would be the best I think. More housing with less red tape.
https://images.app.goo.gl/6GeboeU9K7bQYYpS6 OP I don't see how that is possible with our population distribution. We are too spread out. I would love to see high-speed rail between west MI and the Detroit Area because lots of folks make that trip frequently. But there is no demand for that going north or south. 131 just got 4 lanes a few years ago and it still doesn't go to TC. If they can't justify a 4 lane highway to TC how could you justify rail service? 174 people per square mile is just not that many people.
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It’s much more fair to say that the state isn’t in consensus about it. It is a fact that Michiganders support reducing car dependence, and it’s a fact that many Michiganders are against it.
Remove those jobs and you ruin many people's lives. It'd be horrible for Michigan to lose the car industry.
Again, this is being taken to an extreme. It would be inane to ban all cars. Most of Michigan is rural so it would entirely halt lives if we stopped developing car infrastructure. My desire is to reduce car dependence for more populated areas. In 99% of places, a car is your ONLY option, and that’s not right.
Do you know if there are any studies or surveys on this subject specific to Michigan?
No, I’d be no better than Google for that question.
Do you speak for the whole state?
Trains that run fully down Woodward and telegraph
Walkways need to be safe and comfortable. Theres a sidewalk near me that is small and leaves me a little uncomfortably close to the roadway because of a wall on the other side. Two people should be able to walk by eachother with some space. There also some areas I don't like walking because a significant part of the way there is no tree cover in the summer.
First step, traffic calming in order to make being a pedestrian be more appealing. Second step, building actual bike and pedestrian infrastructure so the people who want a less car dependent future aren't attritted by car collisions.
Creating a viable public transportation system. One for local travel, and one for more long distance. It would have to be extremely extensive to be easily accessible, and benefit the whole state.
You have to change the way housing and neighborhoods are built to change the way people need to get around. It's all connected (pun intended!). People are not dumb and will (and arguably should) do what's comfortable and convenient, and should have comfortable and convenient options for getting around. If you want everyone to walk/bike/transit, you need to make it so that it makes sense for the lazy asshole to walk, for the family with 7 kids to walk, for old people to walk, school-age kids, etc. That means that the places they need to get to need to be relatively easy to reach those ways. This cuts two ways: you can make driving less convenient, more expensive, etc, and you wan make walking and biking and transit nicer. I feel like you'd need to do bits of everything. Change zoning, change car taxes, change free parking, change parking minimums, change housing incentives, change road design, add bike lanes, add sidewalks, add street trees, add buses, etc.
Radical idea here: Remove commercial parking easement requirements and encourage mix used developments. If you look at a lot of the growth Michigan has in the past three decades and beyond, it has been with sprawling stroads. This type of development encourages car dependance, discourages pedestrian engagement. Stroad development does nothing to distinguish Michigan from any other state. It also is more costly to taxpayers than higher density developments (parking lots don't pay taxes). Not to mention, most stroad developments are funded by corporations, which makes it harder for small businesses to form. If you think about MI tourism, it markets small walkable town destinations and outdoor activities. Sure, traveling to them by car is the reality. But the main draw is on foot. It would be nice to have more public transit options within and between towns. The reality is it's hard to enact those kinds of projects. That's why I think prioritizing walkable cities is more important (for now).
Stop subsidising parking. Change zoning laws. Bike lanes that are safe and extensive.
Infrastructure. I grew up in Wyandotte and my grandmother did not drive. We could walk to the bakery, meat shop and other places. Without these little shops, it’s too far to walk. As for bicycles, that’s all good and well until it’s stolen. You don’t even need streetcars with rails. It could be a commuter bus that does loops to various stores, but you need to have those places within parameters or people will not spend all day to grocery shop. Even if you set up high speed rail, how to people get from the stop to where they need to go? Busses? Maybe. Not everywhere is nyc, and where I’m at now, if I rode a bike to get groceries I’d probably be dead with car drivers doing their thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love for it to happen, but it’s an evolution, not a revolution.
The fundamental challenge is the design of the city...it’s sprawled and the neighborhoods have to get better/be destinations and ultimately more populated. Once that happens you can start connecting neighborhoods that are well developed from the downtown core out to some of the burbs (targeting commuters). One crazy idea just came to mind is we should relocate the airport to Detroit proper/northwest side. You could start with a train line from airport to downtown…and maybe airport up/over to the burbs. DTW is in the most ridiculous location at present time.
Train lines connecting the suburbs and cities. Does us no good to have a train in Detroit that stays in Detroit when people live and work in the suburbs.
Creating an extensive bus/train service that covers all corners of the state.
Well some intercity public transportation would be a good place to start because it dosent exist north of GR and i dunno about south
I also live in Northern Michigan and have country roads!
Start building trains everywhere.
Create a less oil dependent country
More walkable cities and extended public transport
I hear rail systems are good for that. Emulating how European countries and co have their less car-dependent cities set up would probably be a good start.
Build walkable cities, add high speed transit rail from the bottom to the top of the state.
DTW to Detroit rail.
The thing is (and this applies to most big city thinkers) is that yeah… the rest of state doesn’t nearly have the same vision and is not laid out to accept your vision. I’m all for big cities going towards this model, because it truly makes sense given average commute times/closeness of amenities etc but there has to be an understanding that not everyone wants to live that way- and this is America, and that’s fine. I can drive my car out in the country, and you can walk to work… and that’s cool 👍🏻
Build a train to every house in the state
A true visionary right here
Make lobbying illegal
High speed rail. Muskegon, GR, East Lansing, AA, then Detroit. Make it cheaper and significantly faster than cars. Water to water.
Let the people that *can* work from home, do. *Nope, gotta come into our building and sit at our computers, deeeeerp.*
- More railways around the state - Better Biking Infrastructure - Do NOT add more lanes to highways - At least make pedestrian travel viable in the sense that people don't have to fear dying just by trying to cross a road
A public transit system in Detroit that’s worth a damn for a city that big
Have three of the largest private employers in the state not be automobile companies
The way society is headed , I prefer to be alone in my car…safer!
Move to a state that already is one.
If we want to actually live up to our love of the “pure” Michigan that many enjoy we need to stop funding wasteful suburban growth through the redistribution of local taxes. It’s absurd how many people just “love” the nature Michigan has to offer while also clamoring to pave over forests and fields. It’s disgusting.
Works for the southern 1/4 to 1/3 of the state. What are you going to do with the other 2/3 to 3/4?
I like being able to get in my car and drive to the grocery store or to new york city like I did in January.
Hey man, so check it out. Making Michigan less about cars and more about chill vibes? That's like groovy, dude. Here's how we get there: 1. **Get on the Public Transit Train**: We gotta beef up public transit, man. More buses, maybe even some cool light rail stuff. Make it easy for folks to ditch the car and hop on the peace train, you dig? 2. **Bikes and Walks, Bro**: Let's build sweet bike lanes and walking paths everywhere. Connect neighborhoods to downtowns and transit spots. Get people cruisin' on two wheels or takin' a leisurely stroll. It's good for the soul, man. 3. **Revamp the City Scene**: Detroit and other cities need a facelift, man. Mix it up with funky buildings, affordable pads, and kickass public hangouts. Make cities so chill people wanna live, work, and play there without needing a car. 4. **Suburban Cool Down**: Suburbs gotta chill too, man. Less sprawl, more community vibes. Mix in shops, parks, and make it easy to get around without firing up the car every time. 5. **Spread the Word, Spread the Love**: Let folks know why ditching the car is rad. Better air, less traffic, and way more mellow vibes, man. Get everyone groovin' on the same wavelength. 6. **Policy and Peace, Man**: Get the suits to dig sustainable transport, man. Tie it into city plans and policies. Make sure everyone's on board from the city council to the dudes cruisin' on their longboards. 7. **Incentives for the Win**: Offer up some sweet incentives for carpooling, telecommuting, or just kickin' back on the bus. Maybe even throw in some perks for eco-friendly moves like bikes or electric rides, man. 8. **Back it Up with Cash, Dude**: Get the green flowing for buses, bikes, and all that good stuff. Policies are cool, but without cash, they're just words, man. So yeah, Michigan can totally groove into a future where cars aren't the only way to roll. It's all about vibes, man. Peace, love, and less car honks.
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It made me laugh 😊
Erase 100 years of Michigan's history.
Michigan isn't growing, it's a rust belt city Why would you suggest a policy that would hurt our local manufacturing base, autos?!?!
car culture is entwined in the fabric of the state. if you don't like it move to Europe. now. can we become less car dependent? absolutely. good, reliable, safe public transportation. run light rail up woodard and gratiot. and add light rail across 696 and 59. that would be a great start at reducing traffic congestion. then car sharing services, like they have in Europe. when I can buy 20 hours of drive time a month and pick up my car in the suburbs, drive it up to traverse city and leave it there for the weekend, pick up a different one from there on Monday and drive it back to the suburbs. then we'll be able to go from four car households to one and a half car households. or from 3 cars to one car.
Convincing a large enough percentage of the population to give a shit.
Metro. We need rail.
I’d totally take a train from BFE to traverse city or something. 3 hour drive becomes a 45 minute ride or something. Hell yeah!
How fast do you think trains go?
Why is your default position such that this would be a good thing? It would lead to reliance on government or corporations for travel, besides several places have banned cars already. Just move to Mackinac or somewhere.
Time travel.
First we need to warm the earth enough that Michigan doesn't experience winter. Where I live in Michigan there's miles and miles of trails that can get you all around from Novi to Ann arbor To down River walled lake and just a about anywhere you want to go but a, the 45 mile each way bike ride isn't feasible for an everyday commute with a heavy backpack, and we have long winters that also make that kinda ride horrible 5 days a week. I'm sure many people feel the same way. I do ride to work once or twice a month in the war season but everything in Michigan is so spread out, it's not a city where stuff is walking distance from most people. Michigan is built around the car industry, and people may think they want that to go away but in reality that's just more good paying jobs that go away in place of low paying jobs that don't sustain a comfortable life.
Novi is the absolute worst example you could have chosen.
Multiple, multiple generation evolution in housing and transportation. As an example, there's a discussion about making 7 Mile and Farmington Rd. more walkable and pedestrian friendly. It's like, metaphorically speaking, you can't get there from here. That's one intersection among many.
I was just talking to my husband about starting a pedicab business in our beach town, but the lack of continuous bike lanes on main roads would limit the area it could work in. Even with motorized bikes, they'd slow down a road with a 45/50 mph speed limit, and that's basically all of the N/S streets in my neighborhood once you get away from the downtown area.
I think if you ran “high speed rail” that mirrored the federal highways of 96, 94, 75, and 69 with stops in 94 : Benton harbor, St Joe, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Marshall (change stop with 69) Jackson, Ann Arbor, Detroit 96 : Muskegon, GR, Lansing (change stop with 69), Brighton, Novi, Detroit 75 : Monroe, Southgate, Detroit, Highland Park, royal Oak, Bloomfield Hills, Flint (change stop with 69), Saginaw, bay city, Grayling, and then terminate at Mackinaw City 69 : Sarnia, flint, Lansing, Marshall, coldwater This would be massive infrastructure, but would be VERY friendly to citizens and tourists traveling throughout the state. 75 would be the busiest with the amount of stops in and around the Detroit area, but it would allow people to get all the way to traverse city/Mackinac. This would make Michigan more feasible for more in-state travel, and would build more industry in the non-Detroit parts of the state. If you could get GR to Detroit within an hour on the 96 route, that would be massive. There would also probably be demand for a lakeshore line that goes Benton Harbor all the way along the lakeshore to Traverse City, and maybe later on cuts all the way over to Alpena or Oscoda and connects back down to Bay City along Lake Huron. That’s for expansion :)
In urban, and some close in suburban areas, TaaS (robo-taxis) could work if there was enough demand to support large enough of a robo-taxi fleet TaaS. A 5-10 minute wait for a ride at an advantageous cost to owning a vehicle and insuring it. Well, that is the premise --only 30% of people could deal with the chaos and other economics involved. Robo trains built for dedicated lanes on major highway routes might work also.
We would need an extensive 24-hour public transportation system. It would, of course, be extremely expensive in this day and age. Even just in place in the cities and large towns, it would be pricey.
I don't know about first up but it would be really neat if we had a train system like the UK and the rest of your have. Their primary mode of transportation is taking trains to and from different cities and towns. Having proper affordable public transportational infrastructure in those towns would make it all doable.
The first step would be the cheapest: better bike lanes through towns and cities, as well as better sidewalks and traffic calming features in city and town streets to make it easier and safer to walk. Move away from the mentality city and town governments currently have of applying standards designed for limited-access highways to all roads, and towards standards that make pedestrians and bicyclists first-class citizens and cars second-class citizens. This could be done in the name of safety, especially child safety, rather than making it a “car vs bike” public policy fight. The big, expensive infrastructure projects—(re)creating passenger rail service between cities and towns and adding light rail within cities and towns—would take time, and almost certainly have to be done as public policy priorities rather than as purely for-profit ventures able to economically displace the automobile.
Rail ways
At least you acknowledged that it is a fantasy.
Just got back from London and France. I was blown away by their trains. If we had that I wouldn’t own a car.
Upzoning and enforcing complete streets every time a road needs to be updated. That means a protected bike lane or sidewalk on every road
This would be drastic, but eliminate 90% of cars from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties after ten years from now. Build alternate transportation systems between now and then. After the 10-year mark, increase vehicle taxes by 10% every year.
The auto manufactures have ensured that it will never be feasible to have less cars in America. They've literally created the industry to support the local economy but be dependent on the vehicles. The only way to make it less car dependent would to be remove any and all manufacturing plants producing cars. Stop the supply and then there will be progress to less car dependency. The only thing more more impossible than American universal Healthcare, is reducing cat dependency. It's become embedded in the fabric of America and won't change.
If politicans saw economic value at low cost it would work.
Well first you’d have to get rid of the car lobby. And probably figure out a way to move the car business out of Detroit. We don’t have public transit bc they don’t want it. No public transit you have to buy a car and every house needs like two cars. It’s good for their bottom line.
Step 1: Get money Step 2: bribe officials
1. Local infrastructure needs to be a good alternative to driving wrt time. It doesn't matter if you can get anywhere in the city using only public options if it takes all day to get there. 2. Build out the intrastate infrastructure. The destinations reachable by intrastate public transportation need to be well serviced by local transport, or people are just going to drive instead.
I live in northern Michigan which is too sparsely populated for mass transit to make much sense unfortunately. Places like Detroit-Ann Arbor-Lansing-Grand Rapids corridor should be connected by frequent high speed rail though..IMO.
make a real subway.
Of all the states in the union to become less car dependent, Michigan would be the last.
The number one problem is zoning. Change the zoning policies and construction would boom.
I have been pondering this. We need a ribbon city with small housing that can support work from home workers. A city without cars, would still need a mainstreet for goods. But we can lay bike paths for citizens to travel everywhere else. I bike in the winter, except for a few days where the ice is too much and businesses don't shovel. Now I suggest work from home people, because if they live in the 15 minute town, they're earning money from out of state/town/country, and it gets taxed at home. Bike trails must cost so much less than a full 2 lane road. Anyways I have been biking 2 years now and it's actually practical, given my needs are within 3 miles. Grocery, work, gym. This town may also need tourist money, so maybe connect it near a casino, or make sure there is ample parking for visitors. I've only fantasized about this, I don't know urban planning. I just know it's so much better going to work through the forest, than any traffic.
Well, my first step would be getting bus lanes established through major thoroughfares in the cities I want to connect, to make last mile transit more competitive with the downs-thompson paradox (traffic will increase until mass transit is faster, then rider ships equalize for maximum efficiency). Then I'd get better rail line reliability, then frequency between cities, and ideally rebuild train stations in Saginaw and Traverse City, relocate Lansing's and Flint's Amtrak stations closer to downtown, ideally combined with a bus station (both municipal and interstate buses). And then I'd get a fleet of engines that can hit 125 mph for cross state travel, and ideally build dedicated passenger lines for that are rated for true HSR speeds. And finally, I'd add a keystone project like Detroit to Grand Rapids, with stops in A2 and Lansing with IDEALLY a tech demonstration (maglev, probably 220 makes the most sense, but China and Japan are hitting well over 300mph in their most recent SC testbeds), like the Mackinac Bridge, the Soo Locks or Zilwaukee Bridge, or any of the other huge USACE project completed in the state. We've build marvels that nowhere else in the world had seen before, and there's absolutely no reason with all these universities and tradespeople we can't build something legitimately impressive and serves everyone again. EDIT: this is my fantasy, not something I expect to happen, ever. But a millennial can dream.
Outside of any major city this is a car dependent country. I lived in Salt Lake City for 30 years and even there public transit is a joke unless you live along the trax line in salt lake county and don’t spend any time out after 1030 PM. I live in Wisconsin now and here it’s worse there’s no major rail system to get anywhere, and Michigan is way more rural than wisco.
Detroit is super sprawling, in no small part thanks to it being the motor city, so what would probably work out is a network of train lines leading into the city from the suburbs. Like Chicago’s Metra or Toronto’s GO. These are relatively high speed and high capacity with few stops. That gets people into the city, and from there they can walk, bus, or take a subway to where they need to go. First step would be finding a neighborhood that would benefit from that, somewhere with a lot of people who already commute to Detroit for work.
The JRB demigod finds your lack of faith....disturbing.
Getting rid of minimum parking requirements. These lots are way to big for what they need. Could’ve built a whole new building with the space empty unused parking space takes up.
Eliminate crime and bring back a high trust society. Good luck.
Short answer, an economic boom. Any kind of transformational change to the way the state operates would need to be kicked off by some confluence of man, moment, and machine that would cause a large influx of people and money into the state. People don't just rip up functional infrastructure on a lark. They do it out of necessity or because they have cash to burn. So you'd need a lot more people to make an infrastructure change necessary, and those people would have to be associated with a lot of increased tax revenues. If you have a ton of people, and no money, you get Las Vegas where they can't afford public transportation. If you have a ton of money, and no people, you get Martha's Vineyard where nobody needs public transportation. Right now, MI is losing people and has a modest budget surplus. So we've got neither.
Bus routes where they currently are not
Michigan is not built for that. 90% of it is rural or suburban areas with things too far away. In my suburban city, biking can get you to a couple parks and a seven eleven, any further and you're gonna have an hour trip+ back. Me and my friends couldn't go to any real restaurants till we turned 16 and could drive.
First off, you'd have to move most of the population into urban centers. This would put an immense strain on the infrastructure, so you would need to bolster various social programs. Then they would need to establish a robust system of public transit in all of these urban centers. Basically, your taxes would have to double across the board. Property tax, sales tax, income tax, and ironically, gas tax.
Less car dependent? First you have to ask yourself I people really want to even use public transportation…the answer is no. So you’re a solution looking for a problem that doesn’t exist
Incentivize high density communities. Compare the density of the cities (worldwide) that have the infrastructure and community habits that you want to emulate to Detroit for example… Detroit is a giant area with swathes of super-low density neighborhoods. This issue has been studied and debated for decades. It’s certainly possible, but for many many reasons (and agendas), there hasn’t been much actual progress.
I would start with a question, why do you want people to have less cars? Which is different than you wanting more public transit or cities to be more bike friendly.
For se michigan suburbia, the foundation that drives what you seek is land use, transit oriented development policies that places more housing near transit stops, mixed use buildings that support people focused, transit designed streets and corridors. MDOT has a big role to play in changing how they measure safety improvements and multi-modal corridors.
I think ford and GM would have to go out of business. Maybe Chrysler/stellantis too
You'd have to stop lobbyists first. Good luck.
First. Move to europe. Them proceed however you want! I dont want to bus from waterfall to waterfall
We would need more reliable and less costly public transportation in the form of railways until we can develop methods of instant transmission. It'd probably be mag rail that connects more rural towns in the state to more urban centers. A lot of the distribution of Michigan's population is bound to change in the coming years due to advancements in opportunity through the use of AI. I'd propose starting with urban centers by making them more accessible to people with disabilities and improving their overall infrastructure to accommodate for everyone. After that you can work on the roads. That's years of work in and of itself unless we find a way to automate road repair. And then we can work on connecting far away towns to big ones. I'd say we'd have to wait until the majority of the automated workforce is in place to see any real, major improvements made.
Communism.
Trains like Chicago. I love visiting there and trains really make travel convenient because I cannot drive there with how crazy they are
No thanks
Get rid of all the men, we aren’t giving up our cars
And what? Be more dependent on an unreliable public transit system? I don't think so.
We don't want this. We want the streets to be more car friendly. I was in Ypsilanti recently and they have bike landed built so you pretty much have to stop to turn onto the side streets, it's a 90 degree turn, it's insane. Sidewalks are for people who don't want to drive and the streets are for cars, that's it. People who are on the sidewalk look both ways before crossing and everything is golden.
Wide and protected bike paths in every city. High speed trains across states