Author: Todd Scott

Little Stimulus Money for Michigan State Parks

Despite the huge backlog in much-needed capital improvements, the Lansing State Journal is reporting that our state parks will not be receiving much economic stimulus funding.

Before all the details of the federal stimulus plan were known, the department put together a wish list of projects it could have ready to go in 90 days. The list included 586 proposals totaling $356.6 million, including more than $200 million and more than 300 projects involving park improvements. So far, only three DNR requests have got to the final round for consideration by federal officials.

Of course the stimulus money is going towards road projects. Our state parks have hundreds of miles of roads, many of which require repairs. However, the state considers these parks roads as “private” and not eligible for funding. These roads don’t even receive funding from the state fuel tax. This is just another fundamental reason why our state park operations are not sustainable.

Best Cars in a Crash (but not the safest)

Auto-centric viewpoints are common. Here’s one that’s often blindy repeated.

Forbes Magazine is reporting on the best cars in a crash and only considers safety from the viewpoint of those inside the car. A quarter of all road fatalities in Metro Detroit are pedestrians and cyclists. Which cars are safer for them? Large SUVs that take more lane width, have larger blind spots, have longer stopping distances, and are less manueverable?

Another problem with this type of article is it assumes a crash is inevitable. In a one-on-one situation, more manueverable, lighter vehicles are more likely to avoid a crash than their heavier counterparts.

This topic was well covered in an older New Yorker article. They review a study of fatalities per million cars which includes drivers, passengers, and the other crash victims. Mid-size cars were in found to cause the least number of fatalities.

Conservative Voice against Sprawl

We’ve spoken up against sprawl largely because it results in auto-centric communities that are often unsafe or impractical to bike or walk in.

Christopher Caldwell has this excellent op-ed in the Financial Times that points out the costly and inefficient economics behind sprawl:

In 1958, the great journalist William Whyte coined the term “sprawl”, in an article for Fortune. He noted with horror that, a mere two years after the Highway Act, already huge patches of once green countryside have been turned into vast, smog-filled deserts that are neither city, suburb, nor country. Developments were concentrated in random political no-man’s-lands near interchanges and exits. Road lobbyists and real estate developers colluded against meaningful regulation and planning, with the result, Whyte wrote, that “development is being left almost entirely in the hands of the speculative builder”.

Whyte warned that sprawl was not just bad aesthetics but bad economics. A subtler and more serious problem than blight was that, for local authorities, the cost of providing utilities and other services was exorbitant. “There is not only the cost of running sewers and water mains and storm drains out to Happy Acres,” Whyte wrote, “but much more road, per family served, has to be paved and maintained.” The infrastructure network that came out of the Highway Act had higher overheads than the one it replaced. It became a bottomless pit of spending.

Of course the Road Commission for Oakland County is paying the price for building a sprawled road network that it can no longer afford to maintain. They did no land use planning. And the Oakland County Commission has regularly selected road commissioners from the county’s sprawling communities, so this outcome is no surprise.

And the article even includes a nod to Detroit: “The encirclement of Detroit’s neighbourhoods by highways is often cited as a primary cause of its decline.”