The I-375 Removal Project Is Dead. So, Too, Is Irony.
Jason Garza, Deputy Region Engineer with the Michigan Department of Transportation, announced yesterday that the next meeting about the I-375 removal project in Detroit would be cancelled. Why? Because, from what it sounds like, there isn’t going to be an I-375 removal project. Why? What happened?
I started attending these meetings in 2017, by which time the project had already been in discussion for the better part of a decade. If you’ve never participated in a project planning process with a department of transportation (better known as a Department of Road Engineering), it typically goes something like this.
Step One. The Department of Road Engineering identifies a project that needs to get done. The project is not a problem, notably. These are different things. It’s my opinion that, beyond routine maintenance, major projects should typically be seeking to solve problems— for example, too many people are dying on Michigan roadways, or, too many people are speeding.
Usually, most projects that Departments of Road Engineering embark upon are not actually solving problems in the transportation engineering sense, but rather in the physical renovation sense. The projects aren’t about improving accessibility, improving safety, or facilitating alternatives to Car, they’re usually about replacing something that is old and, in the process, expanding that thing. We must expand the roads. We must die for Car.
Step Two. The Department of Road Engineering presents several options, called “alternatives,” typically at a public meeting. The “alternatives” are typically a series of design ideas that include various permutations of the state school-educated civil engineer state bureaucrats’ objectives of “Make Road Wider and Faster.”
In the case of the 375 project, this was perhaps most disappointing because MDOT honored the democratic process from a communication standpoint, but not from an implementation standpoint– they said, “thanks for your input! We’re going to do the one that you voted against.”
If you read my article on the subject from a couple years back, I actually looked at all of the public comments and found that they overwhelmingly supported the proposals that would have shrunk the boulevard. The final presentation I saw involved twelve lanes.
Twelve.
It’s ever more disappointing when you realize that the interstate highway was built through the heart of Detroit’s Black business district. White engineers, educated at the same university that, I daresay, pays my bills, engineered the destruction of the Black inner city, and told us to get on board with this thing, because it was progress. Or whatever.
MDOT’s mandate to incorporate tenets of distributional equity and right some of the wrongs were woefully misunderstood by the team, whose members presented as fish out of water on the subject.
This last part, to be fair, is the only thing that I will say is probably not the fault of the engineers themselves. Engineers operate in a determinate world of discrete edges and finite quantities. They do not train– or revel- in the idea of an urban environment where ambiguity and disorder can be used to create innovation.
As mentioned in the article linked above, MDOT believes in road. It believes that not having a 12-lane road might constitute taking away people’s right to get around (career bureaucrat Jon Loree’s words). It believes that cars are, effectively, the only way to get around.
Don’t believe me? Think I’m being too pedantic? Try attending one of these meetings and suggesting to a career road engineering bureaucrat that you’d like to see more space dedicated to non-motorized transportation! It’s exhausting to even try.
Why Irony is Dead
Jason Garza– who will celebrate his 17th year with the road engineering agency- said the decision to shelve the proposal had to do with being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, as though the agency hasn’t been on a decades-long binge of taxpayer dollars, expanding I-96, I-75, I-94, and many more non-controlled access roads. Billions of dollars. The agency’s budget has ballooned while the average condition of lane mile has actually deteriorated.
It’s a complete sham.
And in addition to the fact that it’s hard to take a whole lot seriously out of the Whitmer Administration, this just amounts to yet another disappointing chapter in an endlessly shameful saga of this state’s commitment to live and die by the gas-guzzling, lethal, antisocial motor vehicle.
Which is why I’m doubling down on what my board members tell me is a controversial standpoint: that this agency needs to be abolished altogether and replaced with an ethically competent one.
We e-mailed MDOT and have not heard back, but will note for the record that the agency’s media relations team has not been terribly forthcoming in previous attempts to get in touch.
