John Gallagher has a fine article in today’s Detroit Free Press which discusses the Complete Streets legislation that was passed earlier this summer — but especially from a Detroit perspective.

This whole topic of complete streets has informed much of the discussion lately about how to reinvent Detroit. Many Detroiters now acknowledge that we have too much road capacity in the city for the amount of traffic. That’s an opportunity to repurpose at least some of our streets for more environmentally-friendly uses.

New uses might include running a light-rail line up some streets (as is now planned for Woodward Avenue). And it can mean we’ll see a lot more of those bicycle lanes that are starting to turn up here and there around the city.

Complete streets also can mean bus-only lanes, or wider sidewalks created as part of the network of greenways — nonmotorized transportation venues — that Detroit is slowly creating.

Gallagher also wrote the excellent book, Reimagining Detroit, which made the Huffington Posts’s Best Books 2010: 18 On Social and Political Awareness and the 2011 Michigan Notable Books list.

Chapter 4 of the book is “Road Diets and Roundabouts.”

And, Gallagher also wrote about the city officials recent trip to recovering cities in Germany and England .

In recent weeks, leaders from Detroit, Flint, Cleveland and other Midwest cities have traveled to Europe as part of a “Cities in Transition” exchange sponsored by the German Marshall Fund and the Kresge Foundation.

A trip this month took leaders to Leipzig, Germany, and Manchester, England, following an earlier visit to Turin, Italy. All three cities are reversing decades of job losses and population decline.

…the trips have injected a note of excitement into Detroit’s effort to reinvent itself through Mayor Dave Bing’s Detroit Works program.

It seems both Leipzig and Manchester have made significant investments in bicycling infrastructure.  We asked if those investments made any impression upon the Detroit officials, to which Gallagher replied, “We did see some of that, yet the weather wasn’t very helpful in that regard when we were there….”