Blueprint America: Moving Detroit Forward (PBS documentary)

I am not sure what I think about the documentary that ran on PBS Friday night (and repeated early this morning), "Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City," using the decline of Detroit to discuss transit and its ability to repattern the land use and transportation planning paradigm in the U.S. The show discusses proposals for local light rail service in Detroit, the potential to develop a high speed rail system in the U.S., while looking at the Ave system in Spain , and manufacturing green technology and train and transit vehicles in the U.S. (and agriculture as a way to absorb vacant land in the City of Detroit).

First, Detroit is so lost--more than 40% of its land vacant, its major industry dying in the context of a global economy where the industry of the United States, especially for products manufacturing firms based in the U.S., is no longer dominant and is often a declining player, the region is the most dispersed of any metropolitan area in the country, so much of the population is extremely impoverished--that while they have to do something, transit isn't necessary the magic cure that people believe it to be. (Although maybe doing something with transit is better than doing nothing. And gives people the ability to hope.)

E.g., in the DC region, it has taken upwards of 30 years for transit to start to have the kind of positive economic effect in certain neighborhoods that everyone believes it has immediately.

Cities like Buffalo, St. Louis, and Baltimore demonstrate that in and of itself, adding transit line or two isn't enough, that you need to have a functioning local economy.

And Cleveland, which has had streetcars/light rail for decades--although much of the system was eliminated, with the exception of certain service lines, including providing service to the Airport as of 1968 (or Philadelphia), proves that it isn't transit in and of itself that keeps a region in play economically.

This is why I write about the necessity of preconditions/decisionmaking that allow transit investment and infrastructure to be fully leveraged. Some of the preconditions are:

• the creation of a transit system rather than a single line;
• having a strong central business district and/or other employment centers that remain relevant in an otherwise globalizing economy;
• having extant high quality housing stock such as Victorian rowhouses and recoverable neighborhoods;
• an urban design that promotes walkability and transit use (cities created during the period of the Walking and Transit City eras)
• population density and a growing metropolitan area;
• infill development opportunities;
• some functioning local commercial districts.

Not to mention the necessity of good planning and resident willingness to change land use and development patterns to leverage the public investment in transit infrastructure. Or you can do it the Arlington County, Virginia way, and repattern your land use development in high-density ways to take advantage of rail access. That's harder to do where there are extant long standing and historic neighborhoods.

These factors allow transit investments to grow into something more than transit, yielding benefits beyond mobility improvements.

Some stuff that the show didn't address adequately:

- the reason the Spaniards created the high speed rail system and invested in infrastructure was to allow the nation to rebuild and rebrand itself and its national identity after the many decades of authoritarian rule under Generalissimo Franco.

- that beliefs that somehow U.S. automobile manufacturers can retool, especially in Detroit, to build green infrastructure and rail vehicles are somewhat fantastical. The industry is much different and much less able to innovate and do different things compared to the period (up through WWII) when the original inventors and entrepreneurs who built the industry will still somewhat in charge.

A good example is the computer industry. Companies that built mainframe computers--Honeywell, Sperry, Burroughs, Control Data--and minicomputers--DEC, Data General, etc.--are not the leaders of the personal computing business today. With few exceptions, such as IBM, which has repositioned primarily as a services and software enterprise computing consulting organization, those companies are history.

While it is possible for traditional organizations to innovate, it is not easy, and it's that much harder when your business is failing, rather than succeeding.

It is possible, I will say, to use the abandoned manufacturing facilities for new businesses. But you need the inventors and the entrepreneurs and the venture capital to make it happen. And even in the best case, you need far fewer employees to construct the equipment compared to the early days of mass production, when the labor requirements were huge, and capital equipment was less of a factor than it is today (especially compared to automation).

Probably the most interesting of the people featured on the show was Robin Boyle, professor and chair of the Urban Studies Department at Wayne State University. He is from Glasgow, and discussed how Glasgow declined and then has revitalized since (he didn't use the UK term "regeneration" that is used in Europe to describe what we call "revitalization").

Professor Boyle made the point that took me a long time to figure out, that you have to focus on the neighborhoods and commercial districts that are functioning even in the midst of an otherwise declining area (it's a different application of the Positive Deviance thesis), leverage the assets and build from them, and connect the areas that are functioning.

Since I am such a strong proponent of the theses of Steven Belmont as laid out in Cities in Full, that metropolitan regions need to recentralize housing, commerce, and transit in order to revitalize, I have to wonder if Detroit has declined so much that it is beyond the ability to be saved. Even in the best case scenario, GM and Chrysler will never be what they were. (See "GM's Doomed Future" and "GM, Chrysler, Toyota: How They Doin'?" from Forbes Magazine.)

Maybe Ford Motor can remain strong as a player in the U.S. market while GM focuses on Asia and Europe, and Chrysler becomes a means for Fiat to distribute designs and vehicles on a global platform.

As a former Michigan resident and beneficiary of previous automobile industry success as invested in the University of Michigan, from which I graduated, this pains me greatly.

From Belmont's presentation:

Density alone not enough
The central theme of Belmont’s presentation was that it is inefficient and ineffective for cities to plan for density or transit in a vacuum. He said cities need to plan for density and transit together and they need more than just random density; they need strong central, dense cores to make transit most effective and to support the range of shops and services that make driving non-essential.

Belmont began making his point by demystifing certain beliefs about transit and commuting and how they worked in less dense, edge cities. Belmont declared that “transit is irrelevant in most of America’s metropolitan areas” largely because of the low density and poor layout of those cities. He said where transit is most effective is not in the less dense, polycentric cities, but in the denser, central cities such as Manhattan and Boston where there rests a “critical mass” of customers.

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Note that one of the transit advocates in the program denigrated "jitney" service, which is a form of what I call intra-neighborhood transit service that can be conceptualized and offered as part of a city and metropolitan area's tertiary transit network. But you can't have "mass" transit at the level of a neighborhood in all but the most dense of cities. Definitely you can't have "mass transit" service at the level of a neighborhood when most of the blocks are vacant of housing and/or of residents.

(I have gone back to look at some of the places where I have lived in the city, and at least one of the places is all gone. Nothing is left on the block at all.)