Author Archives: Alex B. Hill

An Intelligent Transit Center for Detroit’s Future

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I won’t claim to be an expert on Detroit transit history, but public transit is a major issue in Detroit that no one living in or visiting Detroit can ignore. I just took my wife and my best friend for the first time on the Detroit People Mover (DPM). We parked near Cobo to avoid a Tiger’s game and the accompanying traffic/ parking insanity, then we took the DPM to Broadway station to grab dinner at Small Plates. The whole ride I kept thinking about the critical link between the amount of parking available downtown and the lack of reliable public transit.

Want to increase public transit? Get rid of parking! 

Parking could be an entire rant of its own, but I want to focus on public transit. Detroit’s most well known piece of industrial “ruin porn” is Michigan Central Station (MCS), originally owned by the New York Central Railroad and built by the same architectural firm that constructed Grand Central Station in New York City. The building was supposed to exude elegance and grandeur, but was marked as an oddity due to the disconnect between the three-story train station against a backdrop of an eighteen-story nondescript office tower.

A Real Public Transit System

The trains arrived in Michigan Central terminal and a passenger could decide to catch a streetcar down Michigan Avenue to downtown or choose to take a horse-drawn carriage (later replaced by taxis). At its peak in 1914, nearly 200 trains left the station each day and in the early 1940s over 4,000 passengers rode the trains daily. Henry Ford even had his own private car that he took between New York and Detroit. During the years of World War II, streetcars were mandated over buses in order to conserve gasoline and rubber. These were the glory days of public transit in Detroit, when you could catch a regular train to Chicago or New York and had the option to take a working network of streetcars throughout the city. Michigan Central Station was a working transit center for the city. In the 1950s, rail travel dropped off significantly with the rise of the auto industry and the construction of the highways. By 1956, all of the streetcars had been converted into Ford coach buses. In 1975, MCS was sold to the newly formed Amtrak, but they couldn’t maintain the costs associated with the massive building with so few passengers and again sold MCS in 1985. With less than a dozen trains a day, the last train left for Chicago from MCS in 1988. Now the building sits on the historic registry, but is unsalvageable and unfeasible as a transit center any longer.

Detroit’s public transit system has been plagued by issues for years. Transit received a boost in 2005 when the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation (DEGC) announced plans for the Rosa Parks Transit Center, which would run alongside the Michigan Avenue People Mover station. The magnificent tensile roof structure wasn’t awarded a contract until 2007 and was finally completed in 2009. Unfortunately, it seems that the only long term planning that occurred was to place it next to a People Mover station. The Rosa Parks Transit Center is located in an odd section of downtown that does not lend itself to integration with a larger citywide or regional transit system. Detroit’s downtown has an iconic hub-and-spoke street design making it fun to look at on a map, but difficult to maneuver for public transit. Likewise, Rosa Parks Transit Center was not constructed to act like other transit centers in large cities.

In other large cities, which Detroit is arguably no where near similar, transit centers are located roughly an average 2 miles away from the city’s main tourist attractions. New York City is allowed to be different because of its high density and small area.

CITY TRANSIT MODES ATTRACTION DISTANCE
Chicago Union Station Amtrak, Metra Rail, “L” Rail, City Bus, Bike Share Navy Pier 2.4 mi
Washington D.C. Union Station Amtrak, Metro Subway, City Bus, Bike Share White House 2.4 mi
New York City Grand Central Amtrak, Subway, City Bus, Bike Share Times Square 0.8 mi
Detroit Rosa Parks City Bus, People Mover Rail Comerica Park/ Grand Circus 0.7 mi
PAST
Detroit Michigan Central Amtrak, Streetcar Rail, City Bus Comerica Park/ Grand Circus 2.0 mi
FUTURE
Detroit New Center Amtrak, M1-Rail, City Bus, Bike Share Comerica Park/ Grand Circus 2.5 mi

A good example of the lack of long term planning is the filming of movies downtown (i.e. Transformers 4). The Rosa Parks Transit Center was shutdown during filming due to its proximity to downtown. This begs the question, do we really think nothing else will happen in downtown Detroit that might cause a disruption of transit service? My bet is “No” we hope there will be a myriad of events and happenings downtown that will bring in crowds of people on a regular basis. Then why was a transit center planned in the middle of downtown? There needs to be distance between attractions and transit centers to make public transit systems a viable  alternative. The other key factor for a transit center is that they are multi-modal: Amtrak + local rail + bus system + bike-share, etc. Thankfully, Megabus also uses the Rosa Parks Transit Center as a pickup and drop-off point. DDOT and the Detroit Bus Company are also using the Rosa Parks Transit Center as their Detroit pick-up location for the Detroit Airport Flyer feasibility study connecting Detroit, Royal Oak, and DTW.

A New Transit Center in New Center

This all leads me to my pitch for a new and intelligent transit center for Detroit. The New Center area marked by the Fisher Building is a perfect area to house an intelligent transit center. There is plenty of space for parking, an existing large workforce that needs to commute, and an Amtrak train station – not to mention it will also be situated along the new M1-Rail line, which also meets up with DDOT bus stops. After mashing up transit pathways for DDOT, SMART, DPM, Amtrak, and the new M1-Rail I came to the conclusion that expanding the existing Amtrak station across the tracks would make sense to bring together a multi-modal transit system for the city where you could catch a DDOT bus off the M1-Rail or take the M1-Rail downtown to the People Mover or catch the commuter rail from the Amtrak station.

As I was preparing to write all these ideas down, I came across this video from America2050, which proposed a high-speed rail connecting Chicago and Detroit (developing “megaregions“) and depicted a new fictional transit center located exactly where I had imagined it should be! A new transit center in New Center matches what other large cities have with a multi-modal center located roughly 2.5 miles away from a city’s main attraction. The New Center Amtrak station will also be one of 5 stops (Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Dearborn, and Detroit) along the new commuter rail being developed by SEMCOG. New Center is also a nice way point between the suburbs, offices in New Center, and attractions downtown allowing people to utilize it for multiple reasons. The parking lot where I am proposing a new transit center near New Center is already managed/ owned by MDOT/ DDOT. This could not be a more perfect scenario. There is no need to obtain the land or convince a business to hand it over for a transit project, it is already owned by the transit authorities. Use the misguided money from freeway expansion to build this transit center in collaboration with Amtrak, expand BRT, and consider more streetcar options.

Working public transit is critical for more than just tourists and businesses. Residents, young people, and especially the working poor rely on public transit to be able to get jobs and keep them. A working public transit system has the potential to increase employment which in turn helps decrease poverty and crime. In an odd way public transit makes urban revitalization benefit people across a city.

Crossposted with updates

Detroit Neighborhoods Map: Agreement

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Detroit neighborhoods are far from being well-known or agreed upon. Arthur Mullen is credited with putting in the effort to identify and map neighborhoods in Detroit in 2003 (map) and his efforts were then scrubbed by Google Maps and quickly became an online standard for neighborhoods in the city. Timothy, who wrote for Huffington Post Detroit, lays out a great history of naming neighborhoods in Detroit (article). Timothy notes that some neighborhood names that appear on Google are completely made up:

Sherwood Park, for example, despite appearing on Google Maps (and a bunch of other places on the web) doesn’t really exist at all. The Eye is just about the coolest name for a neighborhood, ever, except for one problem: nobody actually knows that that’s what it’s called. And whoever thought Fishkorn was ever a good name for anything?

If you like Midtown, then you would be interested to know that the area was largely called Cass Corridor until it was rebranded in 2000 when Midtown Detroit Inc. launched. Recently, there was an attempt to rename the Hubbard-Richard neighborhood, named for Fr. Gabriel Richard savior of Detroit’s 1832 Cholera epidemic. The neighborhood’s best known landmark is the historic St. Anne’s Church, which is one of the oldest standing. Detroit Long Term planning (DFC) was hoping to rename the neighborhood as Cork Town Shores to make the area more trendy.

This past year, Alex Alsup of Loveland Technologies created a neighborhoods map based on user submitted boundaries and pulled together various other sources, like Zillow, to try to give every area of Detroit a name (map).

“We got tired of looking at a Detroit split up by zip codes, and all the neighborhood maps of Detroit that are half empty, so we created a map where Detroit is completely filled in with neighborhoods.

We know it’s not 100% accurate (there’s probably no such thing as a completely accurate Detroit neighborhood map) so if you see things that are wrong, take it to the comments and let us know! The map will change as our understanding of peoples’ neighborhoods does!”

Investment in Detroit is increasing, even in bankruptcy. Developers are coming in and building new things, people are moving into trendy neighborhoods, and more revitalization will lead to even more rebranding of certain areas of the city. The most important and critical step in all of this revitalization and reinvestment is community engagement. Just as there are many areas without a neighborhood name, there are just as many neighborhoods of Detroit that have existed for a long time. New residents and developers need to join these communities while being respectful and understanding of the community that is already there.

The featured map is a compilation of user submitted neighborhoods (Loveland Technologies, n=129), Zillow neighborhoods, and the City of Detroit neighborhoods shapefile. The brighter lines represent more agreement, while the lighter lines represent less agreement. Even from this map we can see neighborhoods that are obviously recognizable. This map also highlights the areas of Detroit that don’t have strong neighborhood identities. Hopefully, more community engagement will help neighborhoods and communities to develop their own sense of identity and naming as Detroit welcomes new investments and new residents.

 

Map: Detroit Area Rapid Transit

DetroitMetro5Scaled

Modeled after the Washington D.C. style metro transit map, jwcons (Jackson) has created this “fantasy” transit map of the Detroit area with an estimated 99 miles of rail and 62 stations.

“Obviously this is pure fantasy in the strongest sense, but I thought it would be fun to think of it as a specific what-if. The closest Detroit ever came to building a subway was during its initial boom in the 1910s and 1920s, which would have given it a roughly Boston or New York-era subway system. (There’s a nice history here if you have JSTOR access.) In this case, though, I decided to imagine a system built at about the same time as cities like Washington, San Francisco and Atlanta in the 1960s and 1970s, perhaps in some alternate universe where one of Detroit’s seven Olympic bids came through and the city built the core lines in preparation. This lets me ignore pre-freeway Detroit and keep more of the Washington Metro style that I’m familiar with. At the same time, it’s a bit of a compromise since I don’t have any 1960s maps of Detroit and I’m not intimately familiar with the city, so the station locations and names reflect the best I had to go on from Google Maps in 2012. Places where there are no houses or businesses often got skipped, even though they may have been thriving in the 1960s and would have warranted a station at that time.”

Read more about this fantasy map from the author HERE

Also see: Detroit Rapid Transit Map 1958

Map of Detroit Riots Fire Damage 1967

Detroit Fire Damage 1967From the Detroit Geographic Expedition Institute’s Field Notes III, William Bunge and his colleagues included maps and anecdotal accounts of how the 12th Street Riots began.

After police raided a “blind pig” unlicensed liquor establishment on the Near Westside and roughed up the people inside, the community became agitated because the unlicensed liquor establishment was actually a welcome home party for two soldiers who returned from serving in Vietnam. Police decided to detain all 82 people inside, but an angry crowd grew as police waited for transportation. Bottles and bricks were thrown at police cars until they all left and widespread looting followed.

Interestingly, it has been noted that the time of the riots in July 1967 was a heat wave with 90-degree-plus days. There is a growing body of evidence that shows high temperatures exacerbate tempers and violent actions. Raids were common along 12th Street, but it seems obvious that Detroiters were tired of the abusive treatment from police, the unfair wages from business owners, and (as a result) the lack of adequate essentials like food.

Note: 12th Street is now known as Rosa Parks Blvd.

Detroit Land Map Art Print

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Artist Jazzberry Blue has made a “pop surrealist”/ pop art interpretation of what looks like just areas between roads in part of Detroit. There is a series of these maps for various cities and its nice to see Detroit included. This print really helps to demonstrate the density of roads in the motor city, built for cars before anything else.

100 Maps of Detroit

detroit100I’ve admired Bill Rankin’s map of “The Midwest” as defined by 100 different corporations, organizations, and agencies. While the Midwest is a contested region, so too is the geographic definition of “Detroit.”

I chose to look at the first 100 images that appeared in a Google image search for “map of Detroit” and overlay the results. Many corporations based in Southfield, Warren, or Dearborn choose to say they are based in “Detroit,” Likewise, most regional organizations (Detroit Chamber, Detroit Water & Sewage, SEMCOG, etc.) represent Detroit with boundaries that extend into surrounding municipalities, most commonly the tri-counties (Wayne, Oakland, Macomb). A number of the 100 maps show urban sprawl to varying degrees while some maps categorize municipalities around the city as “Detroit.” Some maps even included parts of Windsor, Ontario in the “metro Detroit” area. The larger boundaries match the Combined Statistical Area (CSA) and the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as outlined by the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which represent “Detroit” as either a 6 county area (MSA) or a 9 county area (CSA).

I was actually very surprised to find that a great number (35%) of the 100 maps only represented the “Downtown” area of Detroit followed by the City Limits (not including Highland Park and Hamtramck) with the Regional representations of “Detroit” coming in at the third most common. There were two maps of the airport included as well as one map of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota (omitted). I’m not sure what these percentages really represent: where people visit and where investment is focused (Downtown) or maybe a strong regional appeal to being “Detroit.” Thoughts?

Map: Race and Payday Lenders in Detroit

Race_Payday_Lenders

Rob Linn notes that “Nationally, payday lending customers get caught in a predatory cycle.” In his analysis he found that 12% of payday lenders in Detroit were unlicensed, claim false affiliation with FDIC, and almost always go unenforced and unpunished. Rob also found that these predatory lenders were concentrated in areas where a majority African American population lives.

“Given the Detroit City Council’s willingness to standup to other harmful businesses, it’s time to increase enforcement, if not regulation, of these lenders at the local level.  As it stands, the residents who can least afford these punishing rates are the ones facing the consequences. “

Open Spaces and Hantz Farm Map in Detroit

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This is a fascinating visualization of Detroit based on satellite imagery of Detroit. The distinction of “open space” is interesting, especially when thinking about where Detroit current population resides. Population density is not focused in the center of Detroit as one might imagine from the “closed space” in black. The greater question is why Hantz chose those parcels when there are obviously more “open” spaces in the city?

Minimalist Map of the Detroit People Mover

peoplemoverminimal2

Image source

I came across this simplified Glasgow transit map and thought that would be an interesting idea to apply to Detroit’s ultra simple downtown “public transit” system. I choose some highlights of each station stop based on the station guides (no guarantees). The People Mover was constructed in 1987. Detroit was one of four cities selected to receive this “new” transit system as part of the “Downtown People Mover Program,” yet Detroit has one of the two remaining people movers from that program. Last year was the 25th anniversary of the Detroit People Mover.

EDIT: 12/03/13 Lafayette Coney Island added

Map of School Board Income Disparities 1970

bunge_school_board

This map comes from the Detroit Geographical Expedition Institute (DGEI) in the Field Notes II paper. William Bunge and the DGEI had a particular focus on children and how social issues impacted children. Field Notes II was a compelling report that highlighted inadequacies and inequalities in the education system of Detroit. This map demonstrated the income inequality of representation on the school board.

Map: Detroit Construction and Demolition 2006 – 2009

detroit_demo_permit

Not much more needs to be explained here. These maps are good representations of Detroit’s future development especially as Dan Gilbert has been appointed by President Obama to lead the Blight Task Force and says he has plans to demolish every blighted property in the city. Even in 2009 these maps showed a number of building permits Downtown. Soon we will see Gilbert and the Cotton family make their mark on Detroit’s skyline with new skyscrapers. There are notable building permit clusters in the neighborhoods and it would be great to know what those represent. Hopefully, they represent building permits to renovate existing structures. There is a great need for many Detroit families to be able to retrofit their homes in order to improve the health and quality of Detroit’s aging housing stock, maybe there will be federal dollars in the future for such a program.

Detroit Maps at Whole Foods Market

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The new Whole Foods Market in Detroit has some fun maps! The mosaic map located upstairs by the community room appears to represent one of Data Driven Detroit’s proposals for the new city council districts. The map downstairs is less fun and more empty. For Whole Foods, it appears that Detroit is only represented by McClure’s Pickles and Avalon International Breads? Really? Maybe Whole Foods needs to support some other local food producers to help them enter the supply chain.

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Map of Detroit’s Black Population 1940 – 1970

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Detroit’s African American population has followed interesting migration patterns throughout the years. These are a series of maps that help demonstrate how people moved around the city as a result of changing racial attitudes, a growing black middle class, as well as shifting demographics from economic downturn. Paradise Valley can be easily seen in 1940 while it isn’t until later that we see other prominent black neighborhoods emerge to the West of Cass Corridor.

Still trying to track down a source, please leave a comment if you know.

Update 11/15/13

Thanks Matt Baker! These maps appear between pages 183 and 188.

Sugrue, T. J. (2005). The origins of the urban crisis: Race and inequality in postwar Detroit. Princeton University Press.

Map: Detroit Election Wards and Black Population 1915

bunge_black_electionwards_1915

This map comes from a 1926 report “The Negro in Detroit” by the Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Inc. The map provides an historical representation of the limited geographic footprint of Black residents as well as the Black Bottom/ Paradise Valley neighborhood. This map helps to show the base for the racial/political evolution of Detroit.

Map: Public Lighting in Detroit

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Charlie LeDuff recently reported on the public lighting system and how it hasn’t seen investments in the last 40 years. He discovered that the last time that street lights were mapped was on this 1960s era map with pushpins. Incredible that in 2013 the mapping system is so archaic.

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In September, it was also reported that Detroit was conducting a comprehensive GPS light pole audit in a handful of focused zones. The goal is to map 6,600 of the 88,000 street lights in Detroit and then devise a plan to improve the system. Hopefully this street light data collected will be open to the public.

Map: Borders of Detroit

detroit_border

Detroit is bordered by 20 municipalities and 1 river. The Detroit River has the longest border with the city followed by the City of Dearborn. I thought this would be an interesting way to visualize the different borders inside and outside the city without being technical and geospatial.

Edited 11/11/13: Eastpointe and Grosse Pointe added bringing total to 20 municipalities, “Twp.” added to Royal Oak

Test your knowledge with our regional map puzzle!
Check out datasets for Community Boundaries

Map: Race, Voting, and High School Districts in Detroit

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This map comes out of Field Notes II from the Detroit Geographical Expedition Institute and William Bunge. It is a representation of the number of black and white students compared to the number of black and white voters. The DGEI spent the entirety of Field Notes II running statistics and creating maps to show the racial and power imbalance in Detroit’s education system. The premise was that the majority of black students were not being taught by a majority of black teachers or administrators, which led to lower educational achievement. The idea was that a “sympathetic authority” would enable black children; “the most abused children in America,” to be protected from getting gerrymandered into the lowest performing schools.

This is a very interesting tie in to the last decade of difficulties within Detroit’s public schools system. I have a feeling that the DGEI report was not taken into consideration.

DDOT System Map Redesign

DDoT System 09-2013(2)

The French graphic designer, Aurélien Boyer-Moraes first learned of Detroit as a teenager in the 1990s through a TV documentary about the Detroit electronic music scene (before the internet existed). He went on to study graphic design and with the advent of the internet was able to learn more about the City of Detroit. Aurélien has always been interested in mapping and currently works as a map maker in information design specifically on standards for transit systems. He has designed the subway, light rail, and BRT map for Lyon, France.

Detroit came naturally to my mind for a first attempt, as an exercise initially, during my graduate, because I was very disappointed by the actual map which is very poor designed, useless to speak plainly, very much a counterexample… Then after my master and with my professional skills growing along with my experience in that field I updated it  when I have some spare time to follow the system’s changes and my “own” graphics changes. That’s the story : a genuine interest in that city, a genuine interest in transit mapping!
Aurélien first designed this DDOT map as part of his Graduate studies, but has recently updated the map. Maybe someday the transit systems in Detroit will be worthy of his excellent design work.


Map: Color Coded Detroit Growth by Annexation

 

Manual Wayne County

This map makes the rounds of good looking Detroit maps. I’m not sure what year it is from, but looks like it is potential a picture taken of a book page?

EDIT 6/4/14: This map is included in the “Manual, County of Wayne, Michigan 1926” (available online) along with a series of nice color maps of Detroit and Wayne County.

See also, the animated Map of Detroit Land Annexation 1806 – 1926

Illuminated Satellite Map of Detroit

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We are seeking out maps around town. This first one is pretty exciting. Shoot us a message or submit the cool map of Detroit in your office.

The Why Don’t We Own This (WDWOT) office has a new, incredible map of the city! It is a 6 foot by 4 foot back-lit high-res satellite map of Detroit. It is possible to see every rooftop and car perfectly. Jerry Paffendorf noted that he, “can’t stop staring at it.”