Plan Detroit Policy Workshop — Mobility, 4.15.2025
10:29PM Apr 16, 2025
Speakers:
Keywords:
Mobility
land use
transit issues
master plan
Detroit
community engagement
data analysis
policy approaches
safe streets
transportation access
infrastructure
neighborhoods
housing
arts and culture
jobs and economy.
Everybody, great. We're going to go ahead and get this conversation started. This program started for the night. So if everybody can grab a seat, and like I said, we're going to have the facilitated conversations at the purple tables, for those that would like to be engaged in the conversation. For today, we do have an open if you have an open seat next to you at your table, raise your hand so we have some seats over here in the back, and those that are coming in just FYI. So thank you all so much for that. My name is Summer woods. I'm with the woods and lots effect. We are assisting with the engagement with the Smith group. Partner with them, with half of the city of Detroit. So we are excited to be here and to to interact and engage with in this conversation. You had a lot of great conversations that have taken place. You talked about neighborhoods and housing, and we talked about yesterday, arts and culture. So tonight, we're talking about mobility. And so we're thinking about the conversation about mobility today in this conversation about master plan and land use, and they'll talk a little bit about it, but we want to make sure that we're talking specifically to how does that connect into planning and development and land use around mobility, so we cannot solve transit issues. This is not to say we should extend the q line for 30,000 miles. This ain't that conversation, okay? This is not the conversation to say, hey, the connection of smart and DDOT. That's not this conversation. My bus was late. This ain't it. We're gonna prompt you to be able to make sure you know exactly what we're talking about today, and to make sure you have that, I just want to level set I also, even we think about land use, sometimes people have like, ideas about, hey, maybe for a, you know, a bus stop or a transit stop, and we want to put it here on Eight Mile Well, if somebody from the cities of the table, they might say, That's not our jurisdiction, because That's the state of Michigan, or that's Wayne County that owns the land, that owns that particular land. So again, let's just be mindful sometimes people might you know, kind of get you to turn a little bit in your conversation. That's the reason why. So I just want to make sure that we are specific to the conversation we're having today, and making sure that we're getting the best out of our information today and not getting frustrated through things that we can't control in the conversation of transit, because it's such a big monster, we want to make sure that we stay within the area we're in. So we got a thumbs up on that one. Thumbs up, we clear. Okay, so if I come by the tables and I hear you talk about, I want a bus record transit, I call you out okay? Because I saw a lot of fun, so I don't want to see okay, I just want to make sure we good. All right, y'all, so thank you again. We're going to go ahead and kick it off, so the way we're going to start, we're just going to kind of give you a level set of where we are, what's what, what the conversation is going to talk about, but what we're going to talk about today, and then we will get to some facilitated conversations. Just one reminder for people have asked, from a housekeeping perspective, the lights are dim for the program so that we can see the mop to see the screen, but once we start the facilitated conversations, those lights will come up. Okay, so just want to make sure that you all know that. And with that, I want to go ahead and kick it over to to Darwin, who from the city of Detroit planning department.
I thank you summer. My name is Dara obern. I'm the Deputy Director of the Planning and Development Department. Thank you all so much for being here tonight to talk with us about mobility. We're really excited to get into the discussion with you, but we do have just a brief presentation, about 2025 minutes, just to get everybody kind of on the same page as to where we've been in terms of this process, but also some analysis that we've been doing and things like that, and then where we're going. But then we'll break up into our small group discussions, and then we'll have an opportunity to share out and we'll
give a little bit more details about activities in a minute.
So what we're here today for? What are our goals? First is to review, like I mentioned, where we've been, all the work that's been leading up to today, and then really, we want to focus on discussing different policy approaches for mobility. And then we want to you to help us prioritize what you think would work best for Detroit. And then we want to all share out so also taking the double set with everybody, what is planned Detroit? So plan to Detroit is the City of Detroit's Master Plan process update, which is our 20 year policy vision for the city that really lays out a road map for future development within the city. City and how we want to grow and change within the city. It looks at where we've been, where we are now, and where we hope to be in the future, and really one of the ways that I think about it is it also really helps us make sure we're all growing in the same direction. So all the city departments, community organizations, our advocates, we all can come to an agreement on where we want to go as a city, so that we can all be working towards that same vision and work towards achieving these policies. So in terms of tonight, we're focused on mobility. Where do we want to go in terms of mobility for the city over the next 20 years. Where do we want to get to and then make sure that we have the policies to get us there? Okay, just Yeah, yep. Questions will be at the end. So how will man Detroit guide future decision making? So the first thing we need to really understand is data, right? We did a lot of data analysis to understand where we are today. We you know, we are updating a master plan of policies that's from 2009 and we want to make sure that we recognize how we've changed since then, and really make sure that the data that we're analyzing, we understand where we are today and where we want to Go to in the future. But in addition to all the data analysis, and our team will go over some of the data, we want to make sure that we're really hearing from you and really understanding what your lived experiences are, so that we can combine that with the data to ensure that we understand both where we are today and where we want to go. Then I pass it over to Julie to talk a little bit more about where we've been in the process.
Thanks so much. Gara. Good evening, everyone. I'm Julie Carnegie. I'm the project manager over the Master Plan policies update plan Detroit with the city's planning and development department. So plan Detroit has three phases. We kicked off phase one analysis and visioning early last year, and we are just now transitioning into pulling together that data, that research that Dara said, but also some early conversations that we had with residents and other stakeholders together in this phase two draft policies. So over the coming months, we'll have many conversations, some like this, where we're around small tables, maybe talk a little more in depth. Others, more like a traditional community meeting about these draft policies. And then later this year, we move into Phase Three, where we bring everything together that we've learned and come up with together in our final plan. So each piece of the project comes together, kind of like a puzzle, our vision, our data, research, our values, which I'll talk about in a minute. And the next piece of the puzzle, we're here tonight to add start thinking about with you. So tonight's discussion is one of five workshops like summer mentioned at the top of the presentation. We have three down and one more to go tomorrow night. So if you want to come back and join us for a discussion about jobs and economy, we still have space in that, and we think it should register here tonight greatly. So just a quick summary of what we learned from you so far. Like I said, we'll continue to learn from you throughout this process. So from beginning of the project about starting last April, we asked Detroiters to fill in the blank. In 20 years, Detroit will be what give us the word, give us any word we wanted to hear, what issues are most on your mind, but also your hopes and aspirations for the city. So here are some of the words we heard most, words like prosperous, community, driven, diverse, equitable, inclusive, vibrant, safe. So we heard a lot of really great words, but we also got some really good feedback that Detroit is a lot of these things now, there's a lot of great things happening here today, and we do not want the vision statement to discount that or ignore it, so that's some additional feedback. You know that was part of some of those conversations we had with folks while we did a series of about 60 pop ups last summer that we wanted to make sure were incorporated into the plan. We also asked about your top priorities for this planning process. So these both in. Form the topic discussions for the policy workshops. The most important to you are the ones that we host the policy workshops on, and it's also informing some of the policies that you're going to see in front of you here today, just to call out one in mobility, because this this topic had actually one of our most picked suggested goals, and this was around safe streets for all this was the number two overall issue identified by almost 3000 Detroiters who participated in our city voices tour last summer. So I just want to briefly introduce what we're calling, kind of the heart of our master plan, our vision and values. For you all, you'll see these boards along the wall here that have a lot more detail, and we absolutely want to continue to get your feedback on these vision and values. This is our first draft. We want more feedback, and we'll continue to refine them as we go. So based on all of that community input up to this point in the project, we have proposed the following vision statement, in 20 years, Detroit will be a city of choice and opportunity, I would say, knowing full well that this may not be the case for many people right now, and that's why it's that aspiration. It's that thing that we're driving towards over the next 20 years. So how do we advance this vision? We started by building on the things that are already going great, our strengths, like our vibrant neighborhoods, our rich culture, our innovative spirit, but we also achieve it by advancing our values. Values or guiding principles, we should always have the vision where we are going, what we want Detroit to be in 20 years, and our values, the things that we stand for, in mind as we craft policy, so that everything is in align, in alignment with those kind of, as Doroth said, like shared vision for the future. So we're all rowing in the same direction. So these values, I'll just highlight them. There are full definitions for you to review over on the board that we came up with are resilience, equity, innovation, solidarity and legacy. And with that, I will turn it over to Bethany, our consultant team, to talk a little bit more about what we learned from the data.
Thanks, Julie. How's everybody doing? We're still at the moment, we're still tracking fantastic. Like Julie said, my name is Bethany. I work for Smith group as a community planner and designer, and I've also had the honor and privilege of working really closely with summer and her team on the engagement process for this. So I'm really just to echo what has been said. Really grateful to all of you taking your Tuesday evening. Just come with us. I'm going to give you just a little taste of the data and research side to the master plan. And really the goal with all of this is that you all have shared incredible stories, challenges that you experience and visions that you have for the future of Detroit, and a lot of what's highlighted in these data points that I'm going to share is supporting those stories. It's echoing the things that you're telling us as well, kind of marrying those together as we figure out what the master plan should be doing moving forward. So the first tackle thing to kind of understand is that Detroit's mobility infrastructure needs updating. So road networks, bridges, sewer systems, electrical systems, the water system, all of these things were built with a significantly larger population in mind than what Detroit currently has. So at its peak, the city had 1.8 million people living in it. We've got about a third of that today, and also all of this was designed with a really car centered lifestyle in mind. So that's kind of why you see the city sprawled out over 139 square miles, because it was really easy to access 139 square miles when you had a vehicle. But the challenge with all of that is that got a smaller population living in the city, so things feel a lot farther apart. The wear and tear on that infrastructure is something that's happened over decades, and so a lot of our roads and bridges need repair, and this provides us with an opportunity to take into consideration, are we going to continue designing just for vehicles, or are there other means that people want to use to get around the city that we should be considering as we're updating those roads and infrastructure. One of those things can be around transit. So transit service varies based on where you live in the city, although the data suggests that a vast majority of the city is accessed by bus routes in some capacity, the frequent transit service. So when we say frequent transit service, we mean you get access to a bus every 20 minutes, which aware still doesn't feel frequent when you are standing outside in Michigan winters and it's freezing cold, but frequent bus service every 20. Minutes is only reaching about half of Detroit's residents. So that means we have a real challenge getting people in and around the city. And then also, even if you do have 20 minute frequent access to a bus in your neighborhood, the transit connections may not necessarily be effectively linking where you live to where you're going to work. So you might have a bus that comes around the clock every 20 minutes outside your house, but if it can't take you to your job, is it actually serving your needs? This also plays into transportation access, affecting our ability to get access to opportunities. So nearly one in five Detroit households do not have access to a vehicle. So we've expressed some concerns around access to busses. Expressed some concerns around access to vehicles. So if you have a car, centered city, everything's really far apart, and you can't get to your daily necessities and your job centers without requiring a car for travel. Things get really hard. We also have an understanding of the way our neighborhoods look and feel impact the ability to get transportation opportunities in them. So we've got lots of vacant land happening in various densities across the city. Some neighborhoods have a lot of vacant land. Some neighborhoods don't have a lot of vacant land at all, but when you've got those lower density areas, it can become really challenging to get transit service into those communities, despite the fact that they may actually be in most need of those transit services, and then to talk it all off disconnected pedestrian networks, so sidewalks that are broken more frequently, the lack of access to bike lanes means that also being challenged by walking and biking throughout the city, and then ultimately, when you have different needs for transportation, it can create conflicts. So you might have the roads almost so big. So if I already have that road dominated by multiple lanes of moving vehicle traffic and maybe a parking lane on the side. All of a sudden, we're really limited on space to adequate things, or we're really limited on space by how much we have giant trucks moving through our neighborhoods. And not only are we limited on space because of those giant trucks, but they might be causing noise issues in our neighborhoods. There might be causing more wear and tear on the roads in our neighborhoods. We've also still got a prevalence of parking requirements affecting development potential. So how easy is it if you're going to be driving to park your car or get access to an amenity or service, highways dividing our neighborhoods, cutting straight through communities, creating huge barriers to get from one side of us of the city to the other, or from one neighborhood to the next, because the highway came straight down the middle, and then again, some of those wide roads and highways can just make it really difficult to get around the city. All of that being said, we understand that mobility is not uniquely an issue in which we can only see it as its own thing. We understand that all of these mobility issues, as far as accessing our homes, accessing transit services, accessing jobs, these begin to intersect. And so we value the fact that you all are here and interested to talk about the mobility conversation. We also know that this overlaps with what our housing and neighborhood friends talked about Saturday morning, or where our arts and culture friends were talking about last night. And so if you're interested in knowing what some of those intersections are and how the data has also been supporting those, there's a few words behind me that speak a little bit to that, to show how we're overlapping this conversation with some of the others that are taking place this week. With that, I'm going to hand it over to summer. To give a little bit of context of what heck all this means and why you all are here today. You guys kicked off into our activity.
All right, thank you. So we're going to go ahead and get started with the cards. Who essentially knows why we're here today. Can I get a thumbs up? Feel thumbs, okay. Do I have any? Okay, pretty good. Thumbs. Okay. So we have a couple we're trying to so what we can do is we're going to get get into the conversation, and then if there are things that come up, please have them, you know, talk about them at your table. There'll be an opportunity that we'll have a couple of tables for report out. We want to make sure that we're mindful, that we're using time efficiently today, so that we're having those conversations, and if we don't have you here staying too late. So what's going to happen is you have a facilitator at each of your tables. They're going to take you through a series of six cards that have different thoughts, starters through the process and conversation. Now there may be, as you go through those cards, it may be something totally different that you're like, hey, what about this idea? What does this look like? And there are empty, blank cards at the table as well that you can absolutely use as a part of that. So again, we're going to talk about better transit, corridors, hubs, routes. You know, there's a lot of conversations about truck routes. Talks of where they're going through our neighborhoods, you know, and just, again, trying to figure out the different ways and filling the gaps within it. So again, these are conversation starters. It is not concrete as relates to the breakout conversation at your table, but it is important that, you know, we get the context of what we're talking about for today. So again, these are possibilities, challenges. You can talk about what some of those challenges are, but as we're talking about the challenges, I try to find the solutions as well. So as we're going through the conversations, it may be something you've seen in other markets, it may be something you've seen in other communities that we can apply here. That is a great opportunity to be able to talk about that. But going again, this conversation is very city wide, but you may be coming from your lens, from your district and where you live, and that's cool, but it definitely is a city wide conversation. There will be other conversations with each district, but again, please use you. Are you all here are subject matter experts. You live it, you explore it, you go through it every single day. And so we want to make sure that we're using all of that information in order to build that so once you go to these cars, there's going to be a time where we're going to prioritize what's important off of those cards, or what's important offer cards, or kind of ideas that were not on the card. So we can make sure that those are incorporated as well. So with that, what's going to happen is I'm going to for each of the facilitators. I just want to make sure we have a facilitator at every table. Facilitator, you would please raise your hand at each table so I know. Okay. Okay, great. So we have one at every table. Awesome. Alright, so we're going to go ahead and get started with the first card.
I think we have all
go ahead and wrap this up, but before we wrap it up, we like to just kind of do a a round table conversation and have a couple of people that would like to offer up to report out from the table to give us in your conversation, because there's a lot of great ideas that were up here that I saw, and maybe you all have some, you know, some creative ideas I've seen people talk about prioritization for parking for Detroit residents, versus Community strength and oriented development, slower streets, way finding, signage, some pedestrian only zones. So there was some different ideas that were definitely elevated. But at your table, is there anyone at your table that the conversation that you had, it was something that was very creative, innovative, that was discussed that you think It's something that should be elevated.
Okay.
Oh, okay, you you doing, Jake, if you can't see it, this is like an east, west freedom city. Our people express a lot of concern about visibility and intersections. Those of you who have been passed Angel know this is a big hobby course of mine. So this is my vision of a higher visibility cycling infrastructure for the city, where we only have bottlers at the point of egress from the intersection. Does everybody follow me? In fact, okay, we have a baller with the intersection right at the beginning of the block. Here we bother to post so
we have
one bother for the block. But especially in Detroit, long straight streets, high design speeds. Note that one bother for block should be enough, so the motorist should be enough to visually mediate the bike lane. But in between those bollards, the slate is opened. It can't be blocked, because the motorist can easily pull across the bike lane to park. If somebody didn't bike lane, the cyclist still has the ability to get out around us. This is the way Vikings used to be, and this city has the right of way, with and the cultural credibility to return to a model like this.
If we have the courage,
we'll put this.
I like that. Okay, anybody else, right here, right here on, they, they called you out Carolina. What you got? I just want to say that
we are really excited about what they persist. You know? Pedestrian and bicycle routes in our streets and areas that we have truck routes that are separated from those bicycle and pedestrian access routes, we know that the number of so many trucks on any given street has a direct correlation to the number of interest in fatal car accidents. I think that's one step that we can take that can really improve safety, mobility, transportation.
Alright, thank you, Carolyn,
we have one more.
One more, one Oh, okay, oh, maybe two more. We'll come back. Okay, one more, yeah, two more. Y'all don't want me for the last,
Alright, peace, everybody.
My name is Alicia Pardo, uh, working with Cindy burgill, working with charade too, everything. Um, so two things that we thought of that were really innovative. Um, one thing was, when we were talking about the trucks and the freight, you know, and everything like that, we were saying about having, like, a hub where the trucks can go to drop things off, and that the businesses can go to that hub and have it be a little bit more off site, so that it's not in the way of, you know, the residential streets and getting on the way to that, and maybe just like a, like a, like a mini little spot where it's like a local place where the business owners and things like that can pick up their buildings that they need to get and have that be out the way. That was pretty cool. Um, the other thing we talked about was giving the developers and the business owners some type of incentive to create their spaces to be multi modal, like, encouraged to take different modes of transportation. So, like, if you're familiar with like, real estate, don't have the any z zones. And then it can kind of be like that for the mobility innovation zones, and they can get some type of incentives to build it into their plan that is already created from the jump, like that. So
it's like the business space lies almost like a centralized locker storage with a big one, right? All right,
okay, all right.
So it's not innovative, really, but I just want to make sure, because there's a lot of concern when we have major players in the room, that even though there's a need to have more options of mobility, not committing about the aging community, and making sure that their needs are taken into consideration. So a lot of what we saw was about fighting, which is very important, and everyone agrees that it is. It could maybe be done differently or better, but it's still important. The request is to be about even the scooters or the motorized like chairs and things like that, and integrating that into an overall system so that people can age gracefully in Detroit. And that's it. Talk about
that. Um, just talked about that. Just talked about the ADA mobility. We talked about wheelchairs. But sometimes mobile units are wider needs more space. You know that is, that is definitely missing. We actually, we got over on time. We gotta stay on time. You got you? Okay? You quickly? Okay,
okay, alright, alright, alright. Keep going. No, I know I'm going to be talking.
Okay, alright. I appreciate you, brother. I appreciate you. Alright. So I want to make sure we're buying full of time. We truly appreciate you all coming out. We do have a couple of members from the team, Dara and Julie, wearing the purple shirt. So people do have questions directly. They are here to answer those questions from planning and development. Specifically, some people have talked about kind of, what's next, you know, we've talked about the four. We talked about the four sessions. This is being the fourth. The last one is tomorrow, around jobs and economy at the same location here. You all are interested. You register in advance. Great. If you wake up tomorrow. Didn't register like to come out? Great. Come, you know, make sure you come out and be a part of me. This is just a series, so we're we did a series on these particular topics, but there will be other conversations at district levels as well that will be taking place in the next coming months. So we won't stop here in terms of the engagement, but wanted to be specific around certain target areas so that we can make sure that's integrated into the conversation. So I do have a gift card, but I want to is there anybody who's been here all four sessions? That's what I thought we got earlier. Okay, all right, all right. We're going okay. Now. For some Alright, so it might be something for you to learn. So we do a product that might be and it said to me, y'all come Okay, great, because that means y'all really bought that line. Let's give us those people that's been here for the four
sessions, not the staff. Don't raise your hand. Y'all. Hand, alright. So thank you all so much for coming out tonight again. Let's get home safe and let's stay in touch while playing detroit.com. Thank you. Bye.