Beyond the Sidewalk
The state of sustainable transportation in Ann Arbor
—By Jordan Pinet
Living in the midst of Kerrytown for the past several years, traffic cones and partially closed sidewalks are a part of the natural landscape. Though at times a nuisance, I accepted them as a part of the daily routine—new bike lanes represented a move towards more sustainable transit. But now that some of the bike lanes are finished, sustainability seems to be the last priority for people whose cars still line the roads that parallel the bike lanes during rush hour.
Building a few bike lanes alone is clearly not solving the problem. So how can Ann Arbor become the city of trees and better sustainable transport?
The climate of cars
Home to the “motor city” of Detroit, Michigan has long been known for its automotive history. Even as recently as this past August, Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilghrist called the state “the center of the automotive industry in the 21st century.” But could holding on to this past in car-centered infrastructure be holding us back from a future in accessible, sustainable, transportation?
Dr. Jonathan Levine, a professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan seems to think so. “If you own a car, and you’re going from a place that really accommodates the car with lots of parking and you’re going to a place that accommodates the car, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that you’re going to drive.”
It is this accommodation for vehicles that stands as one of the biggest barriers between cities and successful sustainable transit systems. Ann Arbor is no exception. With parking garages and meters available on most of the streets of downtown, and sprawling suburbs with street or garage parking, passenger vehicles made up 84% of citywide vehicle emissions in 2019, with buses only accounting for 2%.
DEI beyond driving?
But discouraging individual driving for more sustainable forms of travel isn’t the only consideration when planning transport. Cities must also ensure that the move away from car-centric cities is accessible to everyone who lives there. Providing transportation that is accessible for people of all ages, abilities, and income levels is a key component to ensuring that sustainable development does not continue to disproportionately affect community members who already face climate discrimination.
Bryce Frohlich, Community Resilience Specialist at Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovations, shared the city’s commitment to this effort. “If we’re going for a just climate transition, not just in Ann Arbor, but in the United States and the world beyond, people have to be really at the center of it.” This concept is an important part of climate justice, so it is reassuring to hear that city officials are building sustainability decisions around community members, but difficult to know if they will follow through.
It wouldn’t be the first time that pieces of Ann Arbor’s bold sustainability promises fell through the cracks.
As Levine puts it, with every transportation initiative there are “political realities.” Even the recent A2Zero plan, which details the city’s ambitious goals for carbon neutrality by 2030, has already begun to fall short of its goals. The State Street bike lane, which was originally to be developed into an all ages and abilities bike lane, is no longer going to be barrier protected. “What we have in the works currently is an unprotected striped lane,” says Levine. “You can’t just paint a stripe and call it all ages and abilities. It is not.”
From transportation to transit
But just what is sustainable transportation, and how do we get there?
Definitionally, sustainable transportation is about finding the least environmentally harmful means of moving people from place to place without, as transport scholar Dr. Jean-Paul Rodrigue writes, “impair[ing] the mobility needs of future generations.” Practically, this means finding ways to move people with less emissions and energy use.
There are many common methods for this in practice all over the world, but the biggest ones are public transit and zero-emission transportation like biking or walking. These systems are the most common methods of sustainable mobility for large groups of people that must travel around a city each day.
But Dr. Levine has found that the mindset of mobility is part of the problem. “There’s a huge legacy of mobility based planning…[but] the purpose of transportation is reaching destinations.” In his recent book From Mobility to Accessibility, co-authored by Joe Grengs and Louis Merlin, Levine explores how transit and land-use planning shift when the priority becomes the amount of access to a location—not just how fast you get there. Through this lens, sustainable forms of transit become the better option, as public transit systems like buses, trains, bike lanes, and sidewalks have a higher throughput of people per vehicle/mode of transport than individual drivers.
Catching The Ride
Though idling cars still fill the roads during commuting hours, other options do currently exist for folks not wanting to be part of the traffic jam. Ann Arbor’s bus system, The Ride, offers a form of sustainable transportation along some of the city’s busiest commuter routes like Washtenaw Ave. According to Levine, these routes are well used during certain times of day. “They had to add buses to the Washtenaw Ave. route to serve the volume, so it’s not a failing system.” Even data from The Ride shows that the service served over 25,000 passengers on the average weekday back in 2016. Though the pandemic seems to have slowed this data collection, the buses have not stopped, and serve many as sustainable transit in both Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.
But great service and consistency isn’t the experience of all riders. One anonymous U-M employee spoke about the unreliability of The Ride. “I live in Ypsi and I would love to ride the bus but…when it sometimes doesn’t come, I can’t depend on that…. I don’t have time to wait for the next one.” I too have experienced the not-uncommon severe delays or missed buses when The Ride doesn’t run on-schedule, or wished that services ran to more places in the city. Without consistent service to all stops, people without flexibility in their day are unable to choose a more sustainable option even if they want to. For folks that have no alternative, the negative impacts of unreliable transportation are just another way that car-centric infrastructure centers those who can afford their own vehicle.
The two-wheeled alternative
An alternate sustainable option, bicycles offer a way around relying on external schedules for transport. As one of the low-emission forms of transit in the A2Zero plan, the city has recently been working to improve biking infrastructure, with the construction of several new bike lanes including those recently finished on South Division St.
According to Frohlich, the recent millage that passed will help continue this specific infrastructure building. This progress is not only an important step for encouraging more biking, but also safer biking for those who already do. A division between bikes and cars is crucial to the safety of bikers in Ann Arbor, as 53% of people killed in Ann Arbor traffic crashes are walking or biking. Sidewalks are not a much safer option. A study in Ottawa and Toronto found that cyclists who bike on the sidewalk experience more collisions and near misses than those who use bike paths or the street. A designated space for bikers is a step towards safer, sustainable transit for all.
Bike lanes are a great start, but do not serve for much transport if people do not have the bikes to ride on them. Thankfully, community organization Common Cycle is working to fill that gap. With programming that both distributes bikes to those who cannot afford them, and workshops that teach people how to repair their own bikes, the organization is a great community resource for encouraging cycling as a realistic and sustainable form of transportation in Ann Arbor.
Continued controversy
But what to do when bike lanes, buses, and even current sidewalks don’t serve the whole community? The Ride does not have stops everywhere, not all folks are able to ride a bike, and, as Frohlich said, even sidewalks can prove inaccessible: “maybe those walking paths are not as smooth or cannot or not wheelchair accessible aren’t friendly to those who need…walking assistance like canes [or] crutches.”
The A2Zero Plan is the city’s current solution to many of these inconsistencies; its goal of carbon neutrality by 2030 includes plans to fill out bus services, bike lanes, and sidewalk inconsistencies. But even if all goes well, this plan is not an immediate solution. As Dr. John DeCicco, a research professor at the University of Michigan Energy Institute points out, sustainable “policies that we might say are best practice [put in place now] would take decades [to] play out.”
Another roadblock seems to be residents themselves.
Though many of the transportation and climate-oriented millages are approved by voters, these “community mandates,” as Frohlich calls them, do not necessarily provide a clear path to progress. Even as recently as November, controversy over a bike-lane plan on Seventh Street has halted progress. Residents rallied against removing street parking for new bike lanes, claiming this change could lead to even higher driving speeds in a neighborhood with children and a local elementary school.
Ann Arbor podcasters Molly Kleinman and Jess A.S. Letaw of Ann Arbor AF, a podcast about local politics, expressed similar concerns in a recent episode about the climate millage on the November 2022 ballot. Citing the problems with the 2020 sidewalk millage, and a recent Ann Arbor school millage whose progress has not been shared, Kleinman said, “My big concern comes down to, I’m afraid that our political leaders (and I’ve seen them do this) would treat millages as the end and not the beginning of the work.”
Building connections…and infrastructure
So how can we move towards a more consistently available sustainable transportation infrastructure?
One way to connect transit links is to first connect people. A big roadblock for much of any project movement is the amount of governmental planning that goes into spending decisions. Levine spoke of how the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) has done a wonderful job working with the city to grant separated bike facilities on Thompson Street. Yet, jurisdiction lines seem to keep these benefits from reaching outside the sphere of downtown. “We have yet to deploy that level of facility outside of the DDA, so I’m looking forward to the culture of developing those spreading…to the city in general.” With expanded collaboration between city committees, Ann Arbor could better create cohesive planning for sustainable transportation infrastructure that both satisfies the city’s A2Zero goals and maintains a drive towards climate justice and equity.
Another missed connection is between the city and the University of Michigan. As a major landholder and contributor of over 60,000 people to the city population, the university is a major player in Ann Arbor, but according to Frohlich, the city “[doesn’t] have much say in what the university is doing.”
This is particularly important when it comes to transit. With two bus systems that serve Ann Arbor and the University, “We don’t make it especially easy to travel from town to all parts of campus,” says Levine. A partnership between Ann Arbor and U-M to create a combined transit system like the one in place at Michigan State University would help merge some of the gaps in access for The Ride, and also make it easier for people who cannot afford to live close to campus.
But how do we get people to actually use the transit? One way is to create incentives to leave cars behind. There are many ways to discourage car use, some of which are already being implemented in other cities. The eternal parking struggle, for one, can be helped by a change to daily parking payment for the University. “You pay for parking on one day and then it’s free for 364 days ’cause you’ve already bought your pass,” says Levine. “We’re not structuring our parking to encourage a daily decision on how to travel. We’re structuring our parking to encourage an annual decision.” This same policy could discourage car use if implemented in all parking garages across the city. Collaborative and consistent regulations that make it a choice to drive, and one to be made regularly.
This is not unlike the trend towards eliminating cars in cities like Paris, whose Metro transit means cars can be banned from the city center entirely. Though Ann Arbor does not have a comparable car-free form of public transit, a similarly intentioned shift here would be to prioritize buses. “If we wanted to operate Washtenaw Ave to maximize the person throughput…we should give…priority to the buses ‘cause those buses are the equivalent of thirty, fourty, fifty cars,” says Levine. Implementing a bus lane that makes taking the bus a faster and more efficient way to travel both reduces emissions and encourages people to choose public transit over individual vehicles.
The other problem with the city’s A2Zero Plan is its lack of commitment to land use planning. With transit supporting zoning regulations that determine how land is developed being controlled by the city, and large tracts of that land being owned by U-M, a unified plan between city and University would allow for development in sustainable transit and city planning that could be the first step in following the examples of other college towns paving the way for more sustainable living.
In the end, as Levine says, it is still about access to destinations. In particular, making sure that these transit plans serve both the places that people live and work, and those places that build community. With Frohlich and the city’s resilience team working on creating “a resilience hub framework in every ward,” it is ever important that these crucial community support spaces are accessible to the most vulnerable.
A long way home
In the meantime, students and other residents like me continue to hop from Blue Bus, to The Ride, to the sidewalk, as we await a more sustainable way to connect to our destinations and each other. For trips in the city, this is functional if not ideal. And though the bike lane construction continues outside my door, it seems I’m more likely to travel the city by car for now.
Feature photo by Jasper Garratt on Unsplash