MyWHaT

“I found myself riding through vast vacant lots, covered over with grasses and some filled with rubble. Once in a while there was evidence of some habitation, but mostly it was a postapocalyptic landscape at its finest. One of the best and most memorable bike rides I’ve ever taken.”

– Excerpt from David Bryne’s “Bicycle Diaries“

After a 26 mile tour last Friday around Detroit, the eerie description from Bryne’s book about biking around the ‘motor city’ has some appreciated context. It’s impressive to contemplate that Detroit was such a major city for such a brief amount of time. The build up occurred so fast, that perhaps the precipitous decline was predictable.

The decline of Detroit is well overly documented, and suffice it to say, what’s left is a physical environment radically altered from the days before industrialization.  Over the last 150 years, the topography of the city was bulldozed and moved around to the point that only the Elmwood Cemetery reflects the terrain expressed before the time that neighborhoods, skyscrapers  and expressways came to dominate.

A lot of concrete remains, but there is little use of the vast amount of over-built roadways and their devices.

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What’s left now is a city prime to be biked; wide roads with little traffic and hardly an incline to be found. In places you can ride three abreast almost forgetting to look-out for cars.

Thanks to Todd Scott, coordinator for  Detroit Greenway Coalition and writer at M-Bike, for the tour. It’s always enlightening to be introduced to a place and have a perception of reality properly shifted. Detroit is yet another place where the struggle to reclaim public space is strong.

I’m already looking forward to the next ride and perhaps there will be a northern Michigan posse organized for the Tour de Troit this September 25th (Anyone?).

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Coasting down into the Dequindre Cut

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Monday’s Quote

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How much of the time you invest in a project is spent preparing excuses, creating insurance, seeking deniability and covering your ass just in case things go poorly in the end?

– Seth Godin, Deniability

Godin takes it further by suggesting, as a point of instruction, that the best protection against failure is doing nothing at all. Of course, you are trying to accomplish something; inaction caused by unneeded hesitation, over-cautiousness and a lack of assertiveness is its own kind of failure.

His post is directed more at businesses, but it is just as poignant when directed at city and regional governments, and the powers that influence them. In Northern Michigan, there are several plans converging at the moment regarding roads, energy, environment, business, vision.

Are we stuck with promises of incremental solutions that rarely produce? How do we get to “yes” faster?

I think it has a lot to do with being mindful of where we place our energy. Are we looking to fully express community values or simply protecting our asses?

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