U-D Mercy Prof Calls Detroit Transit "3rd World"

[Zaiko]

The Engineering dean was one of many who spoke at a hearing took yesterday at SEMCOG in the Buhl Building.

Pro Detroit organizer woman asked the republican led Senate transportation committee why they didn't publicize the event on the sides of buses.

She's on the 3rd audio clip at this link.

http://www.michigannow.org/2012/02/2...pling-detroit/

[Detroit Stylin]

I agree with her whole heartedly...

[rjlj]

I would say worse than 3rd world. I have been to poorer countries where you can still get around very cheaply and with little hassle comprared to the Detroit and Detroit metro area.

The Engineering dean was one of many who spoke at a hearing took yesterday at SEMCOG in the Buhl Building.Pro Detroit organizer woman asked the republican led Senate transportation committee why they didn't publicize the event on the sides of buses. She's on the 3rd audio clip at this link. http://www.michigannow.org/2012/02/2...pling-detroit/

[Bham1982]

It's kind of a silly comment, because developing world cities obviously have good transit, by necessity.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever, there's frequent and comprehensive transit of some sort, though it may be dirty, rudimentary, etc. If 90% of the households don't own cars, there will be transit, even if we're talking hard core poverty. Usually privatized, though.

[poobert]

It's kind of a silly comment, because developing world cities obviously have good transit, by necessity.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever, there's frequent and comprehensive transit of some sort, though it may be dirty, rudimentary, etc. If 90% of the households don't own cars, there will be transit, even if we're talking hard core poverty. Usually privatized, though.

True, and by that logic Detroit should have frequent and comprehensive transit. Some 30% of Detroit households don't have a car, and I imagine over half the population drives dangerous, unreliable shitboxes they have to share with their whole families..

You might add that the second world and first world also have better transit. We're really one of the only places in the world who don't see transit as a priority. One of the many reasons company don't want to invest here and people don't want to live here.

[Danny]

That U-D professor social know-it-all calls Detroit public transit system a "3rd world". That's were are creating and whine to leaders about it. At least D-DOT got some new 1st classes buss than SMART.

[iheartthed]

Sounds about right.

[DinNC]

I don't live in Metro Detroit anymore, but I would love to move back one day. This is a very importnant issue for Detroit, Suburbs, and Michigan. I hope the citizens really back this up. I'm glad to see Synder is pushing for this. I remember reading somewhere Patterson not wanting to play the "build it and they'll come" game with Transit. Does he not realize how many people left because it was never built. Maybe If they build it they'll stay or come back. I hope Mass Transit can succeed!

[j to the jeremy]

The two biggest problems in Detroit are Transit and Education. The lack of safety and the lack of job opportunities are directly tied to both of these issues. In a city with crushing poverty, why are people FORCED to purchase automobiles to get to work? [[and then pay redlined insurance premiums?) In a city with massive spatial segregation, why do our transit policies INCREASE the level of segregation, even when it means sacrificing our entire region's economic health?

I think that the excuse of "car culture" to cover up massive institutional racism and class-ism has run its course. No one ever said that having effective mass transit would destroy our identity as a car-oriented metropolis. We have something worse than third-world transit. We have one of the richest metropolitan areas in the USA and the manpower to fix our systems, but wealthy people in the region repeatedly oppose efforts to regionalize and tax for a system. We have segregation just as bad as most third-world cities. The slums are just in the interior of our city.

Hell, even Baghdad has a metro.

[astongraham]

those buses are more cheap garbage like the rest of the fleet[[get on one and see for yourself). Chicago has first class buses, even their little SMART equivalent offers flat panel televisions when you get bored and wanna watch commercials. These new DDot buses will be run to the ground and non-operational within months, the one I was on yesterday was already filling up with graffiti and garbage from the previous day because I caught the bus very early in the morning.

[corktownyuppie]

At the heart of this is the problem inherent when you have two classes at opposite ends of the polar opposite scale living with each other.

If this was a true 3rd world country, Bham1982 is right. We would have private operators driving man- or horse-drawn carriages. And it would be fine.

The problem is when 3rd world people are living in a 1st world country, requiring them to meet 1st world expectations, which they can't, and preventing them from 3rd world strategies to survive.

Did I just call some people in Detroit "3rd world people"? Yes. I'm referring to the severely impoverished. That group which boasts 10% literacy at an 9th-12th grade level. That group that has household income under $25,000 with 3 children and a single mom.

What is the solution for this? I have no idea. But even the least intelligent can do manual labor, can farm, can hunt. The problem is that in an industrialized world, those roles simply no longer exist and these people have been left behind. Who is to blame is irrelevant. We are all paying the price for having very poor, very uneducated try to live in a highly industrialized, highly educated world.

This is not me advocating for socialism.

Whether or not you think public transit in Detroit is 3rd world is irrelevant. The overarching problem is what do you do with large numbers of the very poor and very uneducated trying to survive in a world that left them behind 50 years ago?

If you think that the greater good is served by giving those people opportunities to advance, then public services will have to be a part of the conversation. And if we fail to do it, I would argue that those trucks slamming into gas stations to steal ATMs won't stop at 8 mile.

On the flipside, I still say that the people who have the money should get to control how it's spent. They just need to be educated -- and educate their electorate -- that this isn't "charity" spending. Funding these services for the poor is in the interest of the rich, IMHO. The poor might not be your problem right now, but when they're eventually living on the streets in your neighborhood it will be.

[drjeff]

At the heart of this is the problem inherent when you have two classes at opposite ends of the polar opposite scale living with each other.

If this was a true 3rd world country, Bham1982 is right. We would have private operators driving man- or horse-drawn carriages. And it would be fine.

The problem is when 3rd world people are living in a 1st world country, requiring them to meet 1st world expectations, which they can't, and preventing them from 3rd world strategies to survive.

Did I just call some people in Detroit "3rd world people"? Yes. I'm referring to the severely impoverished. That group which boasts 10% literacy at an 9th-12th grade level. That group that has household income under $25,000 with 3 children and a single mom.

What is the solution for this? I have no idea. But even the least intelligent can do manual labor, can farm, can hunt. The problem is that in an industrialized world, those roles simply no longer exist and these people have been left behind. Who is to blame is irrelevant. We are all paying the price for having very poor, very uneducated try to live in a highly industrialized, highly educated world.

This is not me advocating for socialism.

Whether or not you think public transit in Detroit is 3rd world is irrelevant. The overarching problem is what do you do with large numbers of the very poor and very uneducated trying to survive in a world that left them behind 50 years ago?

If you think that the greater good is served by giving those people opportunities to advance, then public services will have to be a part of the conversation. And if we fail to do it, I would argue that those trucks slamming into gas stations to steal ATMs won't stop at 8 mile.

On the flipside, I still say that the people who have the money should get to control how it's spent. They just need to be educated -- and educate their electorate -- that this isn't "charity" spending. Funding these services for the poor is in the interest of the rich, IMHO. The poor might not be your problem right now, but when they're eventually living on the streets in your neighborhood it will be.

I've been to Kolkata [[Calcutta) India twice and that is one of the poorest cities in the world. Much of the populace is illiterate.

India has a very service-driven economy. There are millions of people who find something to sell somewhere or some task to perform to get the money they need to support a family. Everything in India is made by hand because people need something to do. It's a nation of entrepreneurs, even if these people have absolutely no education.

Kolkata also has an extensive bus system, tram system, and subway [[which they are still building onto) in addition to all the forms of private transport [[car, rickshaw, autorickshaw, taxi, etc.) So it is far better than Detroit for getting around.

On the flip side, there are also a lot of middle class and wealthy people in Kolkata and it has many of the amenities of any major western city.

[iheartthed]

It's kind of a silly comment, because developing world cities obviously have good transit, by necessity.

Even in Sub-Saharan Africa, or wherever, there's frequent and comprehensive transit of some sort, though it may be dirty, rudimentary, etc. If 90% of the households don't own cars, there will be transit, even if we're talking hard core poverty. Usually privatized, though.

So Detroit's transit is worse than third world then?

[Bham1982]

So Detroit's transit is worse than third world then?

Definitely, though emphasis on the word transit.

Detroit's mobility is comparatively excellent, though transit is horrible.

[iheartthed]

Definitely, though emphasis on the word transit.

Detroit's mobility is comparatively excellent, though transit is horrible.

How can you have mobility without transit?

[Bham1982]

How can you have mobility without transit?

When 95% of households have private automobiles.

For 95% of the region, mobility is fantastic. There are probably few [[if any) metros of similar size with such easy mobility. Freeways are extremely numerous and generally uncongested.

Of course, it sucks for the carless 5%, and IMO there's a moral obligation to see that they have significantly improved options.

[ordinary]

I felt kind of hopeful after listening to the first two clips and then I listened to the third and thought to myself, "It's not going to ever become better." Her rant was disingenuous. People don't care who runs it, they just want it to work! And she could tell by looking at the crowd that nobody there was from Detroit!

[cramerro]

I felt kind of hopeful after listening to the first two clips and then I listened to the third and thought to myself, "It's not going to ever become better." Her rant was disingenuous. People don't care who runs it, they just want it to work! And she could tell by looking at the crowd that nobody there was from Detroit!

Her rant was pretty impressive in that it was well written and delivered very effectively, but her repeated reminders that she is the editor of Voice of Detroit, including once where she plugged her website by saying the web address, made me kick her down a few notches on the genuine meter.

Her overall message captures two major points that RTA critics repeat over and over that demonstrate to me that they are in the wrong state of mind for an open discussion about improving transit for Detroit residents.

First, the message of "this will make Detroit riders second-class transit users." To me this implies that the service, coverage, and quality of transit available to transport city residents will be downgraded. Clearly they either [[a) don't actually use the bus to know the total lack of reliability and service quality, and/or [[b) are just scared of the City not controlling everything. The mayor has been at the helm while the City's own funding has dropped from over $80 Million to what will soon be $40 Million, and has implied pretty clearly that ANY transit subsidy from the City's general fund is unsustainable. The City therefore has made transit riders second-class citizens by default, openly planning to eliminate the city's funding of it's transit system. So I would argue that this means that it CANNOT get any worse under a regional system. On top of that slam-dunk statement, the interests of the region are actually better aligned with a regional system than Detroit's interests separately. This is because suburban businesses need City residents to work for them and City businesses need [[at least a good number) of suburban residents to work for them. This means that the priorities of any regional body making decisions on transit service would inherently be better for everyone than a city system that just gets people around the city and to the borders and a suburban system that has to tell people that they aren't allowed to get on or off along city stretches because they would cannibalize ridership from DDOT. This is not a takeover - this is a resuce plan that is necessary to continue any level of transit service, including to the 120,000 Detroiters who ride DDOT daily.

Second, the complaining about DDOT and SMART not listening to people who come to the public hearings when they plead their life story that relies on service to be changed/cut. To blame the transit providers primarily for the impacts of these cuts is to blankly ignore the fact that these cuts are necessary [[resulting from funding cuts) to move ahead as a functioning entity due to funding reductions that are 100% out of their control. The City cuts $10M from DDOT, property millage revenue goes down 22% for SMART. At least for SMART, they are already running at top efficiecny, having gone through administrative staff reductions and cutbacks more than once prior to finally having to trim service due to the gaping hole in the funding stream. The RTA provides at least some possibility of a new funding stream to help fund transit in general, which is a huge improvement over the current slide downward.

[antongast]

Second, the complaining about DDOT and SMART not listening to people who come to the public hearings when they plead their life story that relies on service to be changed/cut.

There is an established process for implementing service changes, which DDOT has always followed in the past, and it involves soliciting public comments and then modifying the proposed changes to take those comments into account. This time, DDOT started printing new schedules before the public hearings even took place, which made a mockery of the public involvement process and rightfully pissed a lot of people off.

[Hypestyles]

is SEMCOG still mainly pushing for road-improvement? when it comes to their voting members, how many votes are allotted per member community?

The two biggest problems in Detroit are Transit and Education. The lack of safety and the lack of job opportunities are directly tied to both of these issues. In a city with crushing poverty, why are people FORCED to purchase automobiles to get to work? [[and then pay redlined insurance premiums?) In a city with massive spatial segregation, why do our transit policies INCREASE the level of segregation, even when it means sacrificing our entire region's economic health?

I think that the excuse of "car culture" to cover up massive institutional racism and class-ism has run its course. No one ever said that having effective mass transit would destroy our identity as a car-oriented metropolis. We have something worse than third-world transit. We have one of the richest metropolitan areas in the USA and the manpower to fix our systems, but wealthy people in the region repeatedly oppose efforts to regionalize and tax for a system. We have segregation just as bad as most third-world cities. The slums are just in the interior of our city.

[Parkguy]

Highway construction & repair-- federal subsidies [[60% from user fees and taxes)-- 1.9 trillion dollars between 1971 and 2002. That's just federal money, and it is over 60 times the amount Amtrak got. Highway subsidies are invisible to the end user, so we hear complaints that all transit systems lose money and have to be subsidized. But, without the highway subsidies, you wouldn't be able to use your car. I don't hear the Troy mayor turning down federal bucks for her roads. Don't get me wrong-- I have two cars and use both of them. The bus system is useless for me, because it is a terrible system, but I'd LIKE to be able to use it. I'd like some balance in the way things are funded.

[Zaiko]

Bham 1982

In a way I admire your ability to maintain an opposing argument. Birmingham is a real town with a sense of community. When Chris Leinberger wrote the Next Slum for the Atlantic in 2007, he said Birmingham would be one of the few places in Michigan that would avoid the ravages of the pattern of build and abandon.

But I grew up there too. It's still a small, snobby, parochial place of white people who are uncomfortable around blacks, poorer whites, and most foreigners. The people there are not worldly. Most of them can not appreciate the value of being around people that are not like them. They are not interested in being within breathing or underarm smelling distance of the other. Birmingham lawyer Lex Kuhne says metro Detroit's main problem is the absence of common experiences. Kuhne would prefer being able to risk the odors and be closer to others on a train.

A growing percentage of Birmingham and other suburban kids grow up and never come back. Every one from L. Brooks' crowd now has a son or daughter in New York City. By the 1990's, even those kids realized that the 1950's automobile based lifestyles should not be preserved at all costs.

I saw a Mad Max movie once that was supposed to be futuristic. Driving around Detroit at high speed, using our precious dollars so a single person be protected in 3,000 pounds of metal, glimpsing a few human faces but being in position only to suspect them of something, makes me think of that movie. I makes me think of Charleton Heston's[[from St. Helen, Mi) 1973 movie Omega Man. It makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' book, The Leviathan. We will kill each other to protect our rights to private property and our rights to drive around. I wonder sometimes, with all our anger, fear, failure and lack of ability to keep acquiring material things, why Woodward, 275, 16 Mile or 38 Mile don't descend into public demolition derbies.

Brooks, as many people have pointed out on this forum better than I, has invested metro Detroit's future in the 1950's. He has done the bidding for a demographic of perhaps 1-2 million white men and women who live in fear of blacks coming up over 8 mile road.

Governor Snyder's director of strategy and brain trust of the administration, Bill Rustem, asked publicly before he worked for Snyder, when Brooks & Co will stop campaigning against Detroit in order to get elected in Oakland County. Brooks and or that mentality is holding us hostage. We are all poorer because of it.

Your writing here makes you appear to be an apologist for sprawl and perhaps racism. I hate to think that of anybody. Both ideologies are sad.

The answers and solutions for Michigan won't come from the suburbs. The seeds of self-destruction still grow there.

I presume you have a series of arguments to refute Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis.

[canuck]

Bham 1982

In a way I admire your ability to maintain an opposing argument. Birmingham is a real town with a sense of community. When Chris Leinberger wrote the Next Slum for the Atlantic in 2007, he said Birmingham would be one of the few places in Michigan that would avoid the ravages of the pattern of build and abandon.

But I grew up there too. It's still a small, snobby, parochial place of white people who are uncomfortable around blacks, poorer whites, and most foreigners. The people there are not worldly. Most of them can not appreciate the value of being around people that are not like them. They are not interested in being within breathing or underarm smelling distance of the other. Birmingham lawyer Lex Kuhne says metro Detroit's main problem is the absence of common experiences. Kuhne would prefer being able to risk the odors and be closer to others on a train.

A growing percentage of Birmingham and other suburban kids grow up and never come back. Every one from L. Brooks' crowd now has a son or daughter in New York City. By the 1990's, even those kids realized that the 1950's automobile based lifestyles should not be preserved at all costs.

I saw a Mad Max movie once that was supposed to be futuristic. Driving around Detroit at high speed, using our precious dollars so a single person be protected in 3,000 pounds of metal, glimpsing a few human faces but being in position only to suspect them of something, makes me think of that movie. I makes me think of Charleton Heston's[[from St. Helen, Mi) 1973 movie Omega Man. It makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' book, The Leviathan. We will kill each other to protect our rights to private property and our rights to drive around. I wonder sometimes, with all our anger, fear, failure and lack of ability to keep acquiring material things, why Woodward, 275, 16 Mile or 38 Mile don't descend into public demolition derbies.

Brooks, as many people have pointed out on this forum better than I, has invested metro Detroit's future in the 1950's. He has done the bidding for a demographic of perhaps 1-2 million white men and women who live in fear of blacks coming up over 8 mile road.

Governor Snyder's director of strategy and brain trust of the administration, Bill Rustem, asked publicly before he worked for Snyder, when Brooks & Co will stop campaigning against Detroit in order to get elected in Oakland County. Brooks and or that mentality is holding us hostage. We are all poorer because of it.

Your writing here makes you appear to be an apologist for sprawl and perhaps racism. I hate to think that of anybody. Both ideologies are sad.

The answers and solutions for Michigan won't come from the suburbs. The seeds of self-destruction still grow there.

I presume you have a series of arguments to refute Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis.

Well said Zaiko. I also think that the avoidance of human proximity further complicates the problems of Detroit.

I think that the sprawl of the metro and the lack of interracial, and general human interaction that transit tends to promote has had an effect in tearing the social fabric of Detroit. All the stuff that is debated on Dyes over crime, education, suspicion, isolation or ghettoization, and continued lack of concensus building is rooted in the me, me, me reflex.

Heck, even Bloomberg the mayor of NYC takes the subway to work on occasion. In Detroit, you have a guy like Ficano chauffered in a luxury by-product of the auto-centric urb. Ficano's chauffeur equals one less bus driver on the streets of Detroit. This movie at theatres near you in glorious Sickorama.

[Novine]

Nice dodge Hermod. But it doesn't answer the question. Waterford is a township. It doesn't maintain its own roads. Those are maintained by the Road Commission. It has its own water system so its residents aren't paying for Detroit's and Detroit's not paying for it. Why is it that people run around making these claims but then can't back up their claims with some facts?

[Hermod]

Nice dodge Hermod. But it doesn't answer the question. Waterford is a township. It doesn't maintain its own roads. Those are maintained by the Road Commission. It has its own water system so its residents aren't paying for Detroit's and Detroit's not paying for it. Why is it that people run around making these claims but then can't back up their claims with some facts?

Waterford pays for the road commission through their county taxes. The township taxes are a tiny bite of property taxes and are dwarfed by the taxes of Oakland County and the regional school district.

I would think that the median household in Waterford has a greater input to state fuel and income taxes and federal fuel and income taxes than does the median household in Detroit. These are the taxes that are shared.