INTRO: New Urbanists in Grand Rapids are trying to find out how to transform Michigan from a car based society to something new. Transit and urban planners are meeting tomorrow at Calvin College to finish a month long look at suburban sprawl. Michigan Now’s Chris McCarus looks back weeks and even years at the state’s relationship with cars, gas and land.
TRX1: The Ladies Literary Club in Grand Rapids hosted the nuts and bolts of city building. Andy Bowman is from the Grand Valley Metro Council. He says suburban construction has slowed down. And that’s good because it’s often a poor use of people, money and land.
AX1: “Right now most of the townships are not dealing with all the plats that they normally deal with. In fact there are probably a lot that were in motion that have stopped right now. There probably are many strip malls and hiway oriented commercial buildings that are probably sitting empty or need to be leased right now. There are a lot of aspects of the countryside that we built that we’re going to need to come up with solutions for. I think that’s our next ten years here.”
TRX2: Farmers consider suburban Ottawa County to have the state’s richest farmland. Yet, only the Bay City/Saginaw area is losing farmland faster.
AX2: “I hate high gas prices when I’m at the pump.”
TRX3: Suzanne Schulz is with the Grand Rapids Planning Department. She has her 5 minute rule: groceries, work and her kids’ school better be within a 5 minute drive. Otherwise she won’t go there. She thinks more people should get out of their cars and forget that gas has dropped to $1.50 a gallon.
AX3: “But philosophically I love them because I think a lot of land use decisions would be completely different if gas were $5 a gallon. And I think if that were the case for Davenport or other large institutions who chose to locate in corn fields that would certainly play a role in their decision making.”
TRX4: Davenport University is adding dorm halls to the campus it opened in rural Caledonia township 2 years ago. Two years before that, the new interstate paved the way.
AX4: “that what we affectionately called South Belt which is M6 had been thought of as far back as 1955.”
TRX5: I-94 was the country’s first interstate. Andy Bowman says Michigan might end up having the first and last interstates, giving birth to them and unable to let go of them even as other state transportation departments bring them to their death.
AX5: “that is probably the last circumferential freeway you’ll see in the state if not the country. And by circumferential I mean the freeway systems that encircle most metropolitan areas. In fact, nowadays the DOT’s around the country are looking at removing some of those circumferential freeways.”
TRX6: That’s what Milwaukee did when John Norquist was Mayor. He’s now President of the Congress For The New Urbanism. Calvin College invited him to Grand Rapids for a hard look at sprawl.
AX6: “the federal highway administration and Michigan DOT and all that, they create these hideous places that degrade the value of any place that they’re put. And they waste the tax payer’s dollars doing it.”
TRX7: 70 million American households will be built in the next 30 years. Norquist recommends how they should be built. He says we don’t need to plant more corn for ethanol or focus on electric cars. Design can solve most problems.
AX7: “If it was a tighter development pattern, if it was just as tight as pre world War 2 Grand Rapids it would save tons of energy. They could walk to the corner store for milk.”
TRX8: Norquist says sprawl can be retrofitted. He points to Elmer Johnson. He was General Motors’ top lawyer in the 80′s and almost became chairman.
AX8: “he was in charge of all the lobbying and that sort of thing. He said he felt it was wrong to lobby against efficiency standards for automobiles. Against the mileage standards. And to be part of the hiway lobby against transit and for more money for highways when it wasn’t in the car industries interest to do that. It was in the oil industry’s interest. So here Michigan got played for a fool. The car industry got sucked into this mentality that they were not in the car business but rather the maximum consumption of oil business.”
TRX9: This week, GM, Ford and Chrysler execs are speaking to the Senate in Washington. 15 years ago Elmer Johnson spoke to the National Press Club there. Even then Johnson was more radical than car industry execs or Congress of today. He’d be closer to President-elect Obama and the environmentalists. Johnson argued for a 75 cent per gallon gas tax.
AX9: “You’d probably still drive just as many miles. It takes more than a fuel tax to change our devotion to the car as a way of getting around. It is part of the package though. It would have a significant effect in getting people into electric vehicles and other kinds of smaller and more fuel efficient cars.”
TRX10: Elmer Johnson had been retired from GM for 5 years when he answered questions that day in 1993. Here’s the moderator:
AX10: “These questions refer to your suggestions about downsizing automobile production. What do you do about the white collar workers and the blue collar workers and their jobs. And generally the impact on GNP and the consumption of automobiles.”
TRX11: Then Elmer Johnson’s answer. Nearly the same words are being said today.
AX11: “This is not a typical recession. This is a permanent restructuring of our economy as so many people have said. And part of it is we’ve built up these bureaucratic cultures that don’t work very well. We’ve discovered from other folk modern production systems that require a lot less middle management. There is no other choice if we want to be competitive in world markets. There’s a lot of suffering. A lot of it because we didn’t do our trimming year in and year out. So it’s all piled up and it’s been handed to say Jack Smith at General Motors to accomplish what should have been accomplished over the last 20 years in small bits and pieces. But I don’t see any alternative to that amount of suffering. The alternative is even worse and that’s bankruptcy if you don’t do it.”
TRX12: That was the mess we were in 15 years ago. Why didn’t we make any progress since then? Some might blame low gas prices and SUV’s.
For Michigan Now, I’m Chris McCarus.