Introduction, part 1

I really don't expect this blog to go anywhere (kind of channeling MJ here - if you don't expect things to go well, you at least won't be disappointed either way.) But I noticed others in my rough position out there - Scott Trudeau, Bruce Fields (hi Bruce!), and others have done blogs for a while, off and on, about planning/transportation. Since the city seems to be talking out of both sides of its mouth about climate change and transportation, I think I should at least point some things out somewhere. This is a reasonable long-format for it, so what the hell? (You might not want to read this, though, it's bound to be a lot of self-aggrandizing codswallop.) 

I was born in Michigan, and raised mostly in Westland and Canton. Suburbia. I decided two important things as a teen - I was very interested in biking, and I was very interested in getting out of Suburbia. I naively assumed that smart kids in Michigan should apply to go to U of M, and back before people applied to ten universities, I only applied to U of M. To see if I'd like it there, I biked to Ann Arbor from Canton. Biking from Canton to Ann Arbor in the 1980s was not a popular thing to do. I did it a half dozen times, and survived. 

After a bit of problem getting in, I was admitted to the School of Engineering in 1986. I moved in to Markley Hall, and brought my bike in with me. The University has always had lousy bike parking (still does), so both my roommate and I took off the front wheel and stored the bikes in our closet. (Yep, you carried the bike to the elevator, took it up to 6th Blagdon, and mostly carried it to the room. Sometimes they gave you side-eye, mostly they didn't.) 

I should note that while I was at Markley, I worked in the library there. One day while staffing the place, I noticed Professor James Hansen's testimony to Congress on climate change (called global warming at the time, this was Prof. Hansen's 1988 testimony.) I got somewhat involved in the old umich forums on that topic, and considered an offer to head to South America for a summer to help with research. But I didn't think ROTC would approve. I've alway regretted that, and climate change, and the massive US greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, have always been overriding interests for me since reading that testimony. 

Engineering didn't work out, but Computer Science did (funny note, my first piece of 'for fun' software at UM was to calculate bicycle gear ratios using the 3090 mainframe's 'vector' processing capability - in Fortran!) I lost my ROTC spot, and since I was paying for college myself (long story - first person in the family to college, *really* weird dynamic at home I won't go into, parents flatly refusing to pay a dime for college), I got a part time job at the EPA lab on Plymouth. I biked to work, of course. I can remember Plymouth as a two-lane, and a field next to the NVFEL where Kroger is now. 

I've always hoped that the lab would get serious about GHG emissions from transportation, but I'm kind of still waiting. It was EPA regulations that largely created the SUV, have encouraged the monster trucks we have on the roads now, and while I work at the lab now, the place has never taken nonmotorized transportation seriously like the European authorities do. Sad. 

I got out of college, was involved in the AABTS Safety Committee for a while, and then found out about the Ann Arbor Bicycle Coordinating Committee. I expressed some interest, applied for a position, and got in around 1991. The AABCC, or just BCC, was the Ann Arbor citizen advisory committee for bicycling. It's a long story too. Founded back in the bicycling heyday of the 70s, Ann Arbor had a staff Bicycle Coordinator for a long time, as well as a citizen committee. 

At some point in there, the city declared it was ignoring recommendations of their last transportation plan, and attempting to put a road through an old easement just south of my house. I worked with various neighbors on both sides of the expressway to create a "Save our Neighborhoods" group, which got the proposal mostly shot down. However, one result of that campaign was a request from Council to our US Representative for a study of expressway interchanges. Representative Rivers managed to get the study funded - $750,000. 

The city was, at the time, ramping up to do a revised Northeast Area Plan. Back when we did separate master plan sections for the various parts of town, this was a plan for our part of town. Since that planning process was going on, Planning decided to run the expressway interchange study alongside it. That became known as the Northeast Area Transportation Plan process. The city hired an outside consultant, the Corradino Group, to conduct that study. 

Over something like two years of meetings, we proposed all sorts of interchange locations, and the Corradino Group modeled those. Their conclusions were that there was no location in the area that would meet modern interhange design standards. If the current Whitmore Lake/Barton Drive interchange were kept, it would be grandfathered in. But any new interchange proposal would have to meet modern standards, and the location the city had proposed to put a road and interchange would never meet standards. MDOT largely agreed with that conclusion. In the end, the public meeting process recommended that the Barton Drive ramps be closed, but Barton Hills then secretly exercised a veto, and the ramps remain. 

However, not long after that, MDOT decided they need to work on the 'bridges' over that easement, and decided the best way to do that work was to simply back-fill under the bridges, while putting in a culvert, to allow pedestrians and cyclists to continue to cross under the expressway there. Hence the fairly large culvert that exists to this day. 

There was a visiting scholar to the University in that era, who wrote a fairly thorough paper comparing bicycling in Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County to peer areas: "Successful Bike Planning: Adapting Lessons from communities with High Bicycle Use to Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County" in 2001 (Professor Natsinas, IIRC). One of the main recommendations of that study was that what Ann Arbor really needed was a high visibility project supporting bicycling. As I remember it, he pointed to things like the Madison WI State Street bike/pedestrian mall, and Boulder's Pearl Street Mall. 

Apparently foolishly, the BCC recommended that the city consider making Liberty street a bike/pedestrian mall. We even took extra steps to show places they could move on-street parking to make up for the parking that would be lost on Liberty. In retaliation, someone, presumably the DDA worked to shut down the BCC. The mayor stopped making appointments, and the city shut down the BCC a few years later. (The DDA did take advantage of our recommendation to add car parking on Division.) Ironically, Liberty has largely died as a commercial district, which hasn't happened to State Street in Madison or the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder. And when Covid became a problem, the city decided it was a good plan to close portions of the street to allow restaurants to spill out into the street and make a safer, and more pleasant, diner, pedestrian, and cyclist environment. 

At the same time, the city hired Eli Cooper as a person-in-charge of transportation policy, kind of as a replacement for the BCC/Bike Coordinator arrangement. I think overall that was a reasonable decision, if they had to punish the BCC for overreach (any other BCC members who might read this - my fault). I think on par Eli has done a good job. I suspect he's one of the people who has blacklisted me for much of anything any more, but I still think he's been good for transportation policy in Ann Arbor. I think we've made miserable progress since then, but he's always been one person on staff, who had to slowly bring staff along, so miserable progress is better than nothing. 

The city then came up with another commission to handle environmental issues, the Environmental Commission. I was one of the founding appointments to the EC, and part of our mandate was to deal with the environmental aspects of transportation in Ann Arbor. I was on the EC for a few years (two terms?), but the first thing I tried to move forward from the EC was a set of pedestrian recommendations. I'm primarily a cyclist, but we have a very high proportion of trips by walking in Ann Arbor. It's always goaded me that we don't take very good care of pedestrians. Besides, with the high percentage of pedestrians, I thought a set of recommendations to improve conditions for pedestrians would be well received. On the contrary, it was shot down pretty hard at council. I think they read the recommendation from the EC, but it went nowhere at council. It was pretty clear to me at that point that there was no reason to stick around if we weren't really going to deal with transportation topics. (They've since completely washed their hands of the topic, despite it still being in their bylaws and creating ordinance.) 

At some point in that era, I was on the Jackson Huron Safe Speed task force. I'll only say that there were some odd expectations at the end, and, except for Jackson getting changed to a road diet - which was actually a staff proposal - nothing came of that. I think there are people there who blame me, and I blame some of them. 

This is already getting quite long. I'll stop here and write a second intro to cover the rest.