Rail conference

By Chris McCarus

Today in Lansing Governor Rick Snyder continued to push his case for public investment in infrastructure. A deputy U.S. Secretary of Transportation joined him for a today’s conference on rail transit.

Transit advocates helped shape the content of the governor’s speech last week. He delivered it in an engineering lab at Lawrence Technical University in Southfield.

“Why is transit so critical? Well first of all, for most of us, we don’t think about it. But for a lot of people in our state that’s their lifeline to employment. They depend on a bus or other form of transportation to get to work. If they don’t get to work they don’t have a job. If they don’t have a job it’s a terrible situation.  So we need to do better with our transit. The second thing is if we want to revitalize our urban areas, and I believe we’re all committed to that, for Michigan to be a great state Detroit has to be on the path to being a great city. It’s we need a transit system that really works. And the third piece that goes along with that transit system is that is one of the main attractors of young people. And I heard that every day on the campaign trail. Besides jobs it was keeping our kids in the state.”

Snyder proposed beefed up bus lines on Woodward, Gratiot, Michigan and M59. Minus M59, those are the original spokes in the hub of the Detroit wheel. Street cars ran along them for half a century. Now, people in their ’20’s and ’30’s are leaving Michigan for places like Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. They’ve built new transit networks. Click on Detroityes.com for daily discussions about light rail on Woodward. Detroiters are hungry for it.

Bill Rustem is the governor’s land use guru. He said having the city and suburbs agree to bus rapid transit will help get Woodward light rail later.

“Right now what we know is the first 3.4 miles may have at least the building funding if not the operational funding for the first 3.4 miles.  The question is, how do you move people in the short run from there and beyond out into the outer counties. That’s why this kind of a system doesn’t preclude light rail sometime in the future but it creates a system that can work for now because what we have in southeast Michigan right now isn’t working.”

The rail conference was held today at the Lansing Center.  

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