An occasional update on items from Motordom – the Detroit post
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CREATIVITY AND VISION IN DETROIT
What does it need?
Founded almost exactly a year ago to address a lack of parking places in Michigan’s downtowns and suburbs, Michigan Needs More Parking
represents citizens who believe in a basic premise: there should always be a place for the wheels of the people of the state that put the world on wheels.
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CREATIVITY AND VISION IN DETROIT – 2
So yeah, the above post is satirical – but this isn’t:
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All the usual rationalizations: rehabilitation, goods movement, safety, solution to congestion – and now they throw in the needs of cyclists and pedestrians, decreasing pollution and reuniting communities.
A city built on Motordom, destroyed by Motordom, broke and desperate for investment, is going to have $1.8 billion spent on expanding a freeway.
You can’t make this stuff up.
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CREATIVITY AND VISION IN DETROIT – 3. AND IN VANCOUVER
More here at Streetsblog on the I-94 project – and, coincidentally, here’s what YouTube suggested as a related video to the one above.
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Is there possibly a higher priority for $1.8 billion? Well sure, but of course the money is not accessible for those purposes. What keeps Motordom going is its financial resiliency, the sense that the allocated money, even if borrowed, will be ‘lost’ by local jurisdictions if it is not used to build or expand highways.
For instance, the B.C. Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure mentioned in a speech recently that there will be $25 billion spent on transportation infrastructure to 2020 – $5 billion more than what senior governments have financed for Gateway and other projects in the last decade or so.
Could, say, 10 percent of that be reallocated for more rapid transit? It’s very unlikely there will even be a discussion of repriorization because it’s assumed that the money cannot be reallocated.
Why not?
Detroit is only a more obscene manifestation of the same phenomenon.
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Interesting story on CBC this morning about housing affordability: Vancouver is the least affordable in N. America, while Detroit is the most affordable. This “problem” in Vancouver was attributed to restrictive land use policies, suggesting that if we followed Detroit’s example we would have fewer problems with housing affordability. I guess that is true.