Editorial: Look who's blazing public transit path (Grand Rapids)

Regional cooperation on transit and other issues is one reason Grand Rapids continues to leave southeast Michigan behind. All in all, Michigan's second largest city is faring better than other urban areas, with far lower rates of poverty and population loss and a thriving downtown.

Grand Rapids and its core suburbs -- Kentwood, Wyoming, East Grand Rapids, Grandville and Walker -- generally understand that the region's residents will rise or fall together. They showed that again earlier this month, when voters approved -- albeit narrowly -- a significant tax increase to fund improvements in the regional transit system, including a new nine-mile rapid transit bus line serving downtown Grand Rapids, medical facilities on "Pill Hill" and the southern suburbs.

Significantly, young voters in Grand Rapids helped lead the millage campaign, underscoring the importance of transit in attracting talented young people to a city and keeping them there.

The high-speed Silver Line bus route should be running in two or three years, putting Grand Rapids ahead in the race to build the
state's first rapid transit system. It will also get the inside track on securing state and federal transportation funds.

Grand Rapids area voters approved a 0.35-mill increase in the transit levy -- to 1.47 mills -- for seven years. The money will pay for more frequent buses and extended hours on existing routes. One-third of the increase -- $1.2 million a year -- will go for operating the rapid transit route on Division Avenue.


Continued at: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...=2011105150510


http://cmsimg.freep.com/apps/pbcsi.d...W=640&Border=0

The area of downtown Grand Rapids called "Pill Hill" will be served by a new rapid transit line, thanks to voter approval of a millage increase. The system will connect the medical center to southern suburbs. / ADAM BIRD/Associated Press

Grand Rapids is hardly "leaving Southeast Michigan behind".

It's a country-feeling little metro area that has a tiny fraction of Metro Detroit's wealth, population and influence.

It also has a lower per-capita transit share than even Metro Detroit, which is really saying something.

And there is no such thing as a Grand Rapids "rapid transit line". They're talking about bus upgrades only. It's not like any bus line in Grand Rapids would have remotely comparable service to D-Dot/Smart Woodward service.

BTW, there is a rapid transit line already in Michigan. It's called the People Mover, and look at all the good it has done [[sarcasm).

The transit measure sounds like good news for Grand Rapids, but considering their current service is even worse than ours, it's really only an incremental step in the right direction.

Bham, have you even been to Grand Rapids in the past 3 years? I wouldn't say they are leaving Metro Detroit "in the dust" per se, but they are doing things right over there and I am proud of Michigan's second city. GR has definitely embraced the measures necessary to see their city into the 21st century. It is cosmopolitan, developing, and overall feels like a much larger city than it actually is. GR is a great town destined for great things if they keep on the path of cooperation and progress that their metro residents have seemed to embrace.

The irony of this great resurgence in GR is that it is being pushed, cajoled and financed by right wing republicrats of the billionaire variety. The Devos and Van Andel families are behind so much of this stuff. They're the first ones to deny it to other communities in the name of promoting 'individual responsibility', not picking 'winners' and denying socialism. Yet, when it comes to their home territory, they have no problem doing all of the aforementioned. Mind you, I don't think what they're doing is bad, it's just hypocritical.

PS: I wish GR well. I've had an ongoing relationship with GR going back to the 70's when I assisted college friends in running a 'head shop' on Plainfield NE and crashed on College Street. Those were the days when the cops shadowed us because we had long hair, stopped into the shop for impromptu searches and bragged up their department as being the best vice, morality squad in the nation. Based, I guess, on the fact that they harassed a bunch of young, struggling hippie entrepeneurs. Regardless, I always liked the city, even though it wasn't the vibrant city then that it is becoming now.