Time Magazine included this quote from Toni Griffin. Ms. Griffin is a lead consultant for the planning effort to re-imagine Detroit, now called the Detroit Works Project.

Detroit is the only metro region in the U.S. without a metro transportation authority. If we begin to think about the role of transportation in the region differently, how we move from place to place becomes a crucial question. Efficiency — and the idea that we shouldn’t have to rely on a car so much — becomes part of the question. I like to think of Detroit not just as the home of automobile innovation. It’s the home of transportation innovation.

We’d like to see more mention of other transportation modes beyond cars and transit. We have shared that information with the planning team.

This is likely a case of light rail being more sexy than biking.

We know bicycling is huge opportunity that provides one answer to How will things move?

We wanted to mentioned one interesting story told by Susan Zielinski, a managing director at UM SMART at this week’s CEO for Cities conference. Zielinski moved from Toronto to Detroit and quickly learned that cars are transportation. Everything else is alternative transportation.

She said that’s like saying men are just alternative women.

We’d talked about the term alternative transportation before but this was a clever retort worth sharing (and re-using.)

This entry was posted on Friday, November 12th, 2010 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Detroit, Planning, Public transit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.