A Transportation Manifesto For a New Decade

The system of slavery, of course, was a stain on the American republic a good deal darker than our transportation system, and Garrison's call for immediate emancipation can't quite be matched on this front, since physical infrastructure takes time to build. That said, there's no question that the current auto-exclusive system is deeply unhealthy, and while all change must be incremental to some degree, we'd better make those increments as big as possible if we want to save our state.

It's 2011 now, more than a century since the first Model T motored onto a Michigan street, more than fifty years since the last streetcar rolled down Detroit's Woodward Avenue. Most people alive today have never seen a Michigan whose cities weren't ruled by the automobile. We take its hegemony for granted, and the slow pace of our retreat from that mindset comes at our peril. This decade, it's time to accelerate.

The transportation fight is just one part of a much larger war, the war for Michigan's social, economic and ecological survival. We're losing that war, thanks in part to an antiquated mid-twentieth-century transportation system that strangles our cities, pumps millions in gas money out of state, and stokes the fire that's cooking our planet.

In the year ahead, then, we'd do well to follow Garrison in the work to move Michigan towards healthy transportation: no equivocation, no excuses, and no retreat.