If Robert Smith's Detroit News blog post made your head hurt last week, wait until you see what self-published novelist Dan Calabrese has to offer on The News' political blog.
Calabrese is outraged -- outraged! -- that MDOT is considering alternatives to rebuilding I-375 that may include replacing the subterranean freeway with a surface street.
Detroit News: That hatred of interstates probably fuels this “hot trend” to some degree. But it cuts both ways. If you want people to work in the city, you have to give them the easiest access possible to their workplace. As much as you may want to pretend it’s the 1950s again, much of the city’s workforce is going to be coming in from the suburbs, and nothing is going to change that. That’s not to say they can’t handle a mile or two more worth of surface streets, but we need a better reason for subjecting them to it than the desire to follow a trend or the fact that freeways bother you.
And this entire discussion goes nowhere if it isn’t addressing the real issue, which is how you improve the fundamentals of Detroit’s population makeup. Right now Detroit is dangerous and economically depressed because most of those remaining in the city are those who lack the education and the economic marketability to live somewhere more desirable. Changing that is not going to happen quickly, but there will be a temptation to think you can kick-start the process by attracting people back from the suburbs by changing the urban environment to make it more attractive to them.
Being one of those suburban commuters who works downtown, I can say I-375 is a pox upon my commute. Woodward -- a surface street -- is the preferable route in and out of downtown during rush hour traffic, even when Woodward is congested. This idea that the put-upon commuter simply cannot be subjected to more surface streets is more than a little disingenuous. Surface streets are not the same thing as a 13-year-old who won't shut up about Twilight. (Is Twilight still a "hot trend," I have no idea?)
Considering that expressways are basically 50something years old while surface streets and roads have worked well for thousands of years, it's kind of ironic that Calabrese would suggest the more traditional roadway is the passing fad, or "hot trend" as he likes to say. No, that's not ironic. Ignorant is the word I'm looking for here.
And, skipping the code-speaky stuff about Detroit's population "fundamentals," is Calabrese really arguing that making a part of the city attractive to middle-class residents is a bad way to attract middle-class residents to the city? Yes, he is.
