Originally Posted by
professorscott
The simple fact is, any additional cost to a parking lot operator will be passed on to the consumer, thereby driving up the cost of parking and further discouraging people from coming downtown, because unlike other cities, in Detroit most people consider the automobile the only way to get downtown.
If you want to reduce the blight of the kind of surface parking which exists in Detroit in massive quantities, moreso than any other city I've ever been to, then you must change the perception that the automobile is the only way to get downtown, and the only way I know how to do that is to provide decent transit.
But that requires vision, imagination, money, and the willingness to learn from successful regions. In Detroit [[the region), we just keep filling out Einstein's definition of insanity: keep doing the same things, and expecting different results. So we'll just widen I-94 and M-59 and continue to develop the M-53 expressway further out into the middle of effing nowhere, and expect a regional renaissance. Sigh.