Detroit one of America's most "compact" cities; Warren one of most "sprawling"

[jt1]

Then why is it that the only road people bitch about on this forum is the I-94 widening?

How does widening a road through an area that has seen massive population decline support your or Hermod's belief?

Also, the issue with 94 is that [[a) it doesn't need to be widened based upon traffic counts and [[b) MDOt, being the fools they are, decided to implement this in a way that causes the most destruction in one of the few growing areas of the city.

You're going to have to do more [[and support it with facts) to prove that MDOT and SEMCOG are either working with a very specific agenda or are just a bunch of morons that believe that planning hasn't changed between the 1950s and now

[Don K]

Given the known inaccuracies of the Census US Population Estimates, you can't tell whether the area is shrinking or growing from this data--the change is too close to zero relative to the expected errors in making the estimates. And even if you assumed the numbers were exactly correct, this amount of growth or shrinkage wouldn't really tell you anything other than that the population is pretty static.

On the other hand, in some cases it appears that the numbers do work as an impromptu Rorschach test.

Fair enough. The larger point is, whether the population is up or down a few thousand or exactly unchanged, the region as a whole is losing people to the rest of the country. That's assuming, as I mentioned above, that there's a positive rate of natural increase [[births minus deaths), which is pretty much a sure thing - the population is a bunch older than it used to be, but it's not that old just yet. This net outmigration is indicative of a region - not just a city or a county, but a region - in economic decline, and nobody's found the answer to that yet.

Again, I'll let an expert on population dynamics opine on whether Oakland's roughly 2.5% estimated population growth over three years means it's on net an importer or exporter of people. I'd bet it's pretty close to even, which means that, even if OC is gaining people from Wayne [[a pretty safe bet), it's losing people to the rest of the country, just like the rest of SE MI.

[Don K]

Ask for rowhouses and you'll get single-use, suburban-style townhomes stretching for blocks. Oh well.

You mean like those barracks-style things at Maple and Coolidge?

[Hermod]

"It is always population first and roads later."

You have clearly not lived around here for a long time.

You are not making sense unless you consider I-75 and I-94 to be examples of your position. M-150/Rochester Road was two lanes all the way done to 16 Mile/Big Beaver. It has since been widened to four lanes from Big Beaver to Orion Road. North of Orion Road, Rochester Road is still two lanes. Rochester and Troy had explosive growth long before Rochester Road got widened to four lanes. I can remember the bumper to bumper traffic morning and evening before M-150 got widened.

Look at a SE Michigan map and where the two lanes and four lane roads are. A lot of new growth is occurring along the two lanes roads. Eventually, they will become clogged and then will be widened to four lanes.