My, gosh, I am really starting to think we are going to get mass transit. Birmingham and Troy are deep into a multi-year collaboration on a transit center that they hope will be part of region wide mass transit.

Check out this website http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/charrette/. When I read this, I had to kind of pinch myself to see if I was dreaming. The ideas around this are incredibly progressive at least for suburban Detroit. It’s really exciting.

Keep in mind: this is not some wild-eyed dream. This program is sponsored by municipal governments of Birmingham and Troy. If you had said in 1995 that Birmingham and Troy were going to [[a) collaborate; and/or [[b) work on developing mass transit, you'd have been carted off to a mental hospital.

These two cities held a second Charrette on this last week, which I attended. It seems very real. There are already some very good urban developments around this proposed station – the so-called Rail District in Birmingham – including new row houses and adaptive reuse of old industrial buildings. Here are a few pictures from the 2008 Charrette materials, available on the above-referenced website.


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What I find very refreshing is the full embrace of not just urbanism and transit but a new sense of regionalism. The planners at the meeting told me there was broad-based public support for the transit center. With the possible exception of Bloomfield Hills, it would seem to me at this point that every municipality between Pontiac and Detroit is now on board with mass transit along Woodward.