See, my disagreement with you about MCD, and transit in Detroit in general, is that Detroit was not built as a car-oriented city. It was built as a mass transit-oriented city that built cars. If you look at how Detroit has deteriorated today, it has deteriorated outward from those neighborhoods that were the least car oriented, and spread like a wildfire to everywhere else. I don't see how you can rectify this without rectifying the transit situation.
Thus, I think that Michigan Central is where the line in the sand needs to be drawn. Detroit has already sacrificed many buildings in the name of progress, only to move towards that progress at a snails pace. What Detroit has not put two cents towards, in fifty years of scratching its head about the urban decay, is improving its mass transit infrastructure. There are numerous examples of cities in America who have turned themselves around through the use of transit systems: New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco. I can't think of any major American city that has had a major turnaround and not had transit as a main focus.
[[Btw, I hear that Obama is supposed to be making some major announcements this week about high speed rail networks in the U.S. The northeast corridor is jockeying for special attention because they already have a pseudo-high speed rail line in place. California is jockeying for attention because it's California and they will never let the rest of us forget that they have the 8th largest economy in the world. But I think the Detroit to Chicago line has a great chance of being the test-dummy for high speed rail funding in the U.S. If that happens, then that will really make the discussion about what happens to MCS interesting...)
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