They're spending all their money on roads built to handle more than double the number of current residents.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those roads were built decades ago. Im sure the only thing they are paying for now is resurfacing.

And not much of that.

Yeah, wouldn't that be part of their decline management program?

Resurfacing is still expensive.  It's not usually as simple as just scraping off the pavement and laying down new.  There's always utility covers that need to be jackhammered out and reset, drains that need fixing, curbs that need repair, etc.  Even if you can avoid those things, the most basic grinding and resurfacing with asphalt costs about $200,000 per lane per mile.  With major city streets being 4-6 lanes, and some of those in Detroit 7-8 lanes, that's easily $1-1.5 million per mile. 

Hell, even Columbus is letting its roads go bad ( a recent study gave poor ratings for several roads) to put off having to spend money on them. To give you an idea here is an article on what Columbus is spending this year ($30 million) and how much the city will need to spend each year just to maintain roads in current conditions for the next five years ($60 million). Yes, resurfacing definitely isn't cheap, especially when you have as many very wide and long roads as Detroit, although with all of our annexed land that contains roads within  212 sq miles vs Detroit's 138, so the costs may be somewhat similar.

This is the Motor City ... and this is what they do.

I like those Chrysler commercials. It makes you want to buy American but I heard Chrysler is being sold to a company out of Italy if it hasn't already so the ads are a bit misleading. Sort of like Chrysler is just covering their tracks. Everyone nags on the City of Detroit but really there's only so much they can do when people aren't willing to invest in the city. 

I actually lived in Detroit and I'll wager they spend less of their budget on street maintenance than most other cities of the same size

 

^How do they do that?  The streets in the above pictures don't look that bad. (says the guy from Youngstown, who lives on a street that hasn't been resurfaced in over 40 years...)

It is open question whether Chrysler-Fiat well end up an American or Italian company. The Italians are increasingly taking control, but Italy is shrinking faster than the US and the head of Fiat was born in Canada, so there has been some discussion of combined company hq'ed in the US.

actually, many of the roads in those pictures are pretty heavily traveled. they're spokes bringing people into the center of the city for work. They are pretty nasty for pedestrians, though.

^How do they do that?  The streets in the above pictures don't look that bad. (says the guy from Youngstown, who lives on a street that hasn't been resurfaced in over 40 years...)

 

Easy.  They don't salt or plow anything but the main arteries.  You'd be amazed how much street damage is caused by plow trucks. 

 

By the way, this is a really stupid thread.  Detroit is broke for a hundred reasons & none of them is because they are maintaining wide unused streets.

 

Um, no, it's most definitely one of the reasons.  It may not be THE reason, but it is one.  In fact, this is a big factor in why our whole country is in such straights at the moment.  This stuff is NOT cheap, and so much of it has reached its end of life and we can neither afford nor justify the expense of repairing it. 

Cities spend tens of millions of dollars each per year maintaining their roads.  As a country, we spend almost $200 billion per year just on highways, which doesn't even include the bulk of the road network.  You think that's somehow insignificant? 

 

  The cost of building new roads and maintaining roads is a small cost when compared to the total cost of all government, but it is still an significant cost.

This isn't a stupid thread and Gottaplan, JJak you guys are acting like intellectual narcissists. Any time you have dispersed residents, you have a bigger tax burden for infrastructure on each resident. If Detroit had more densely pop. neighborhoods each resident would be paying less and the city would be more likely to get the money. Usually you could count on industry alleviating the tax burden from residents but that hasn't worked out well in Detroit. Even city leaders of sprawling suburbs where they once promoted irresponsible land use are speaking out about how the tax burden on residents is killing them and they aren't nearly as bad off as The D.

It's not the sole cause but it's a contributing factor.

There's no reason to ever tell anyone that the thread they started is stupid.  You are always welcome to participate if you have something useful to add to a thread.  If not, you're always welcome to not participate.

 

Detroit was laid-out (as some one mentioned above) in a wheel and spoke pattern.  Woodward, Grand River, Michigan, and Gratiot Avenues as well as Fort Street are the "spokes" and they are, indeed, wide.  Their width was prescibed nearly 200 years ago and is not the result of poor planning in the present.  While three lanes of traffic in each direction as well as a left turn lane and parking lanes on the sides is the norm on these streets, most streets in the City of Detroit's residential areas are wide enough for parking on one side with two lanes of traffic. 

 

It is also worth noting that the State of Michigan's Department of Transportation picks up the tab for a large portion of the maintainence on the large streets I mentioned, as they are all state trunkline highways.  Don't the Feds and ODOT pick up the tab on Broad Street through Columbus, for example?  Without consulting a map, I seem to recall that it is (or at least, was) the route of US-40.

 

The original poster does bring up an interesting point, though: What is the "Incredible Shrinking City" to do with all of that infrastructure?  There are some blocks in Detroit with literally ONE house left standing!  Yet that street remains paved, the streetlights remain lit, the water main is maintained, the sewer continues to drain, etc...$$$!

 

Meanwhile in the suburbs people complain that their streets are not wide enough to handle the traffic, their wells are drying up due to so many people drawing from the same aquifer and their lakes are experiencing elevated bacteria levels as a result of seepage from septic systems.  Ain't sprawl great?

Following is an e-mail I sent to Chuck Mahron at Strong Towns relating to this exact issue (specifically how to deal with excessively wide roads).  It's a puzzling question because anything beyond simply letting the streets go unmaintained still costs money. 

 

...

 

Hi Chuck,

 

I want to start off by saying how much I've enjoyed listening to the Strong Towns podcast and reading and commenting on all the blog posts.  After commenting on The Public Safety Industrial Complex and listening to your most recent podcast on firefighting, I think a valuable topic to tackle at some point would be strategies for implementing road narrowing. 

 

It's one thing to change codes to allow narrower roads to be built, but with growth already in the toilet and the (hopeful) prospect of people moving back into town and city centers, the challenge is how to deal with the existing roads that are already too wide.  As you stated in the last podcast, a lack of funds are going to force the issue of cutbacks in fire protection no matter what the fire chief's objections may be.  The same is true for road maintenance.  No matter how wide or narrow we may want roads to be, the funds to maintain them are dwindling, but so are the funds available to change them as well. 

 

This is really the crux of what I'm interested in, and could make for a good blog post.  How do you reduce the maintenance burden of a wide street, or narrow it to improve neighborhood life without requiring a huge capital outlay to change its geometry?  As an engineer I suspect you could answer this better than I can, but the biggest cost in building or maintaining a street is in the base prep, constructing the curb and gutter, dealing with storm drains and manhole covers, and pouring new sidewalks and driveway aprons.  Basically, the money goes mostly into the concrete and utility work, while the asphalt is a small portion of the overall expense.  All that work on curbs and storm drains and such is relatively independent of the width of the road too.  Do you know, for example, how much a 40' wide street with mountable curbs and no sidewalks costs in comparison to say a 27' street with 6" curb and gutter and full sidewalks?  I wouldn't be surprised if the 27' street was still more expensive to build due to the extra concrete for the sidewalk alone. 

 

Of course, once it's built, I certainly understand that the maintenance of the narrower road is less because the curb/gutter and driveway aprons, drains, etc. can remain untouched through several asphalt resurfacings.  Still, that brings back the question of how to deal with existing streets that are already too wide.  If there's not enough money to maintain them as it is, then where's the money going to come from to relocate storm drains and to pour new curbs and sidewalks?  I have a few ideas that don't require full reconstruction, but I'm sure there's other strategies to consider.  I tried to include some examples where possible.

 

1. Do nothing

If a neighborhood street is too wide and expensive to maintain, then just let it be.  As it deteriorates, it naturally creates a traffic calming effect.  This isn't a particularly palatable option because of how bad it makes the neighborhood look, but it also requires no implementation. 

 

http://maps.google.com/maps?gl=us&om=0&ie=UTF8&ll=39.136002,-84.437538&spn=0.006017,0.009763&z=17&layer=c&cbll=39.136096,-84.437524&panoid=JAkpJfyCI_K22_uLO6L3rA&cbp=12,358.6,,0,15.38

 

Leaving exposed brick or granite block streets should be a no-brainer, but there's so few of those left I don't know that it's worth bringing up. 

 

2. Maintain only the travel lanes

Where there's a lot of on-street parking, only the travel lanes need to be maintained to a higher standard.  The same goes for center turn lanes where they're not needed.  I'm surprised we don't see more of this, but like doing nothing, it doesn't look good and can cause drainage issues. 

 

http://maps.google.com/maps?gl=us&om=0&ie=UTF8&ll=39.156845,-84.387494&spn=0.003007,0.004882&z=18&layer=c&cbll=39.156815,-84.387417&panoid=lg9mtl7sUg30euqRYUUg3A&cbp=12,188.71,,0,12.71

 

3. Replace parking lane paving with something more permeable and requiring less maintenance

This is getting into a more expensive upfront cost, but it may not be as bad as reconstructing a whole new set of curbs and such.  The driving lanes of the following example road were very recently repaved, but with almost no manhole covers and no curbs or anything else to fix, it was certainly a very inexpensive rehab project.  I don't know when the pavers were installed, but they seem to be holding up ok.  There's aesthetic issues to be sure, but it's not as bad as crumbling asphalt.

 

http://maps.google.com/maps?gl=us&om=0&ie=UTF8&ll=39.157858,-84.386845&spn=0.003007,0.004882&z=18&layer=c&cbll=39.157858,-84.386845&panoid=OSNOv-NS0ihe5ArjntAIxw&cbp=12,9.46,,0,15.48

 

4. Gravel streets

100 years ago when many city and town streets were just dirt, they still maintained a level of finish and sophistication through frequent cleaning, raking, rolling, and sprinkling.  Could some residential streets be realistically converted to gravel/macadam surfaces?  Maybe just the parking lanes if they exist?  This is not workable on any street with an appreciable slope, and there are concerns about weeds, scouring, clogged drains, etc., but it has been done.  This and #3 do have benefits for reducing storm water runoff, but I don't know if that's something worth getting into at this point. 

 

http://maps.google.com/maps?gl=us&om=0&ie=UTF8&ll=30.320257,-86.139218&spn=0.006696,0.009763&z=17&layer=c&cbll=30.320425,-86.139761&panoid=UoQrMCDFXc1HADLvUs43Lg&cbp=12,295.36,,0,26.07

 

What else is there really?  Things like curb bump-outs and pedestrian islands are very good things to be sure, but they don't reduce the cost of the road by much, if at all.  Road diets too, which Cincinnati has been doing to implement bike lanes, also don't reduce the amount of pavement, but they do better reallocate road space.  Of course there's full reconstruction to a narrower cross-section as I've mentioned, but is that realistic to pursue in a more austere financial situation?

 

I realize this has gotten fairly long, and I'll leave it here, but I do think it would be worthwhile to address this topic.  Some of the above situations, by somewhat blending the zone between the pedestrian and motor-vehicle realms can also address some of the problems of fire trucks.  That transitional area that can be taken up by parked cars, kids playing, or whatever, helps to pedestrianize the street, making it feel narrower, but also allows more room for maneuverability of emergency vehicles.  In fact, many wide pedestrian-only paths through universities are usable as fire lanes even though they're usually closed off to all traffic.  So even if the street itself might not be adequate to appease the fire chief, there might be other ways to accommodate them, with or without smaller vehicles.

 

 

...

^How do they do that?  The streets in the above pictures don't look that bad. (says the guy from Youngstown, who lives on a street that hasn't been resurfaced in over 40 years...)

 

Easy.  They don't salt or plow anything but the main arteries.  You'd be amazed how much street damage is caused by plow trucks. 

 

By the way, this is a really stupid thread.  Detroit is broke for a hundred reasons & none of them is because they are maintaining wide unused streets.

 

Um, no, it's most definitely one of the reasons.  It may not be THE reason, but it is one.  In fact, this is a big factor in why our whole country is in such straights at the moment.  This stuff is NOT cheap, and so much of it has reached its end of life and we can neither afford nor justify the expense of repairing it. 

 

http://www.freep.com/article/20110414/NEWS05/104140555/Detroit-workers-could-push-back-against-concessions?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cs

 

Take a look at this attached article & graphic & see if you still feel the same way.  Not sure exactly of the breakdown of their street department, but having over 60% from general employee wages & benefits from 48 different employee unions seems like it might be a bigger budget buster than some wide unused streets which probably rarely get plowed, salted or swept.