No one is scared in downtown anymore. But I used to live in downtown over 20 years ago and it was scary. Just walking down Woodward at night was dangerous but you look at it now and wonder how it ever was like that.
My grandmother is convinced it’s still like that. She would not have let me go to WSU except it’s the only school in Michigan that offered a degree in Mortuary/Postmortem Science
In this case, it’s due to the way the infrastructure currently stands in Detroit. So many people moved out of Detroit years ago that 1/3 of the population is left to maintain the city. They need people to move back to generate money in order to rebuild.
Kind of. The housing prices are rock bottom. there is also a sense of community that is utterly lacking in the airless suburbs. Seriously, there are some subs in places like Novi or Farmington that were built in the 80s and are completely lacking in sidewalks. Compared to that, some neighborhoods in Detroit have affordable homes, neighbors, and urban prairie. Seriously, Ive been to farms on land left to seed.
Also, there is a wave of gentrification coming through… Mostly on the riverfront and along the Cass Corridor into Midtown. The Illitches and the Rocket Mortgage guy have both invested enormous quantities into fixing up that zone, and at least before the pandemic, there was really a sense that a recovery had begun. A lot of white people have been drawn to the area and a lot of old industrial or commercial have been redone into luxury apartments. And honestly, the corner of Jefferson and Woodward on a summer weekend is insanely nice these days.
I want to point out that there are still rough scrabble areas in Detroit, like Brightmoor. But down by Hart Plaza? Wayne State? The Fox? You’ll be fine.
While public transport is undoubtedly fantastic, let’s not pretend that it’s a great option in many European countries. I’d love to take the train in the UK, but thanks to the Tories it would cost me more to take the train (when it works) than it would to drive and park.
I think you just underestimate how awful public transport is in the US. Beating what’s available here is not a high bar to clear, especially when it’s nonexistent in many places. It can also vary pretty widely across and within regions. I imagine public transport in London is a different beast from public transport in Manchester, for example.
When I was visiting Manchester in March, it was pretty great. I could get around the city via bus, tram or walking pretty easily, and trains between Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds were all pretty clean, even late at night, and the most I paid for two round-trip tickets was £48.40 going to Leeds and back. Everything else was below £30 for two people, round trip.i Wherever I got off, I could get an Uber to where I was going for less than £10 if I didn’t feel like waiting for a bus, or there wasn’t a bus nearby. For a similar trip here, for one person going from NYC to Philadelphia and back would run me in excess of £100 with Amtrak making the trip in about 90 minutes, or closer to £30 round trip, but with each leg taking nearly 3 hours without any delays on NJ Transit. A 15 minute Uber here to work would routinely run me close to £20 each way, before accounting for a tip.
Nobody was screaming in my face asking for “donations,” there weren’t people with amplifiers blasting music, or homeless folks left to stew in their own filth keeping entire cars unusable for anyone else due to the stench. Even walking about the cities at all hours of the night, I had a grand total of 3 people ask me for money in a week. Residents apologized a few times about how awful things were there, but it was absolutely lovely, even in the parts they thought were local embarrassments for allegedly being unbearably dirty or run down. Granted, it was nice and cool, so I didn’t get to see if Manchester gets the same lovely summer effect that NYC does, where every outdoor space smells like hot piss and garbage once the temperature clears about 27°C.
Granted, spending a week in a city as tourists isn’t the same as living there, but from folks I know who’ve made the move, it was a massive upgrade in terms of things like public transit and general quality of life compared to life in the US or Canada. I ran the numbers, and it would actually make sense for me to take over a 50% pay cut if I could move there. Heck, it was cheaper for us to eat out for every meal for a week straight for two people and me buying several coffees out a day than it is for me to shop and prepare every meal at home and make all my own coffee here. Even if things aren’t as good as they used to be, they’ve still got us soundly beat in many regards.
The UK just decided they’re not in Europe. The rest of Europe has better PT than the UK. In the UK it was cheaper to hire a van and drive to Exeter than to catch the train, absolutely ridiculous.
Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).
I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.
But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.
Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.
I never get this argument of US Americans against public transport. Even in europe most public transport happens within one city, I don’t regulary drive to another country
I’m genuinely curious if people actually use the phrase ‘US Americans’, or if it’s a reference to that Miss Teen USA contestant rambling about world peace
I spent a few months in Germany years ago, and “Americans” (Amerikaner) tended to be used to refer to people from the Americas (either NA specifically or NA and SA collectively) in my experience. If you wanted to say someone was from the US, you’d say something more like “aus den USA.”
I think most Americans like the idea of public transport, and including a robust national rail network. The reason it doesn’t exist are the oil and automotive lobbies. (Mostly oil.). Poorly educated Americans (the ones wearing MAGA hats) are easy to manipulate by these groups, as well.
The MAGA people rarely travel outside of their county and think going to Applebees in the nearest college town of 5,000 is going to the big city. Why they hate it.
They act like it their tax dollars when in fact most of them don’t work and sit around in their Methlandia towns on fake fibromyalgia disability claims.
Americans don’t generally have a negative thing to say about public transportation. Americans, however, prefer to drive their own vehicle for many reasons. For one, being independent, not relying on a schedule. Not worrying about missing their transportation and catching a later one, then being late to the arrival of their destination.
I don’t know where you live, but in the big cities of the U.S., public transportation… isn’t exactly hygienic. You will smell urine. You will encounter chitty people. You will be spending time reading all the random chit people write/scratch onto the walls and glass. You will sit on uncomfortable chairs, might even touch someone’s chewed up gum by accident.
I’ve seen some chit both in city busses and trains but this was in Chicago and some parts of NY. Never would I ever want to live that life. Ever.
That’s because on average, people in Belgium are more civilized than Americans. Do you have homelessness problems in your nation? No? We do. Yes? Do your homeless literally pull their pants down in broad daylight and take a chit on the sidewalk for everyone to see without a single fk given? Bet you don’t. We do.
I bet in your college towns and cities, if you have parking garages, you don’t have urine and or chit in the elevators and or staircase… we do.
You see… in our nation, we truly have the chittiest of chitty people overall, mainly in large cities. They are chitty in many chitty different ways. And we have to share public everything with these chitty people. So yeah, unfortunately, public transportation is going to be chitty on average, day in and day out.
More funding doesn’t necessarily work in this situation. There’s a big stigma about public transportation in the US where if you take it you’re seen as unsuccessful and poor. It’s also perceived as something like government intrusion whenever infrastructure is built to support it. Minorities would resist any kind of building of rail along their property because they were previously screwed over when several black and poor neighborhoods were bulldozed for the sake of placing freeways. Rich people simply lobby the government to stop construction or hold back on selling their property because they want to gouge them for all they’re worth and sap the project’s funds.
The solution of course would be a bigger willingness for the government to use eminent domain laws to force these projects through but because of the short term nature of their precarious elected positions, officials would rarely do that lest they get voted out in the next election cycle and the project simply stalls out. There’s been some success with private companies building rail, like Brightline, because building public infrastructure in a capitalist way seems to be accepted more by the public thanks to our conditioning of loving the free market.
Did you know, on the internet you are allowed to actually type out swears? You don’t have to act like a child and write “chit” everywhere instead of “shit,” we all know what you mean.
For one, being independent, not relying on a schedule. Not worrying about missing their transportation and catching a later one, then being late to the arrival of their destination.
This is my big problem with public transport. It might be an issue of funding, but this sort of scheduling gives me a huge amount of anxiety. I would rather drive and know that I can leave when I want, and that any delays won’t be a problem, than to worry about the making it to somewhere at a specific time lest I miss my bus/train/plane.
And the more modes of public transit we add to the journey the worse my anxiety. If any of those connections is delayed or late I have no control and will miss the next leg of my journey, which will push all the other steps around and suddenly I have to get a hotel or something because there’s no way to get to where I’m going until the next day.
At least if I’m caught in traffic I can try to route around it, or I can leave a earlier or later to avoid it, and the person who’s affected by these delays is the one who has some power over mitigating them. If it ends up that I’m driving overnight I can pull over and sleep in my car for a bit and then keep going.
My ADHD brain panics if I need to catch a scheduled train and if I’m not actually there at least 1/4h in advance I melt into a puddle of anxiety.
But city trams and metros are absolutely fine. If I don’t catch this one, there’s gonna be another one in a few minutes. No worries.
Busses that are scheduled every half hour at most drive me mad tho. Did I miss it because it was 10 mins early because fuck schedules or is it gonna be 15 mins late?
Sorry to hear neighbour. If it’s any consolation, on some of your highways, you can go hella fast.
In Switzerland we don’t even have high-speed rail. We have at best pendular high-speedish trains but they are quite neat. We do pay a steep price for it but it beats being required to drive everywhere US-like (minus some exceptions).
Yeah, your highways are not great. But I don’t really like to drive, so I’d prefer you trains. :) What use are high speed trains, if they are 2 hours late?
The larger the area you have to cover with rail is, the larger the cost. The US is much more spread out in general than European countries - some people choose to live hours+ away from significant population centers. There’s no need to decide which system is inherently superior. Cars work for the US, trains work for Europe.
There’s a lot to do in Detroit, honestly. Downtown that is, including family activities. I pretty much go to Dearborn every month for bulk purchases of halal chicken, beef, and lamb and dining in. Downtown Detroit isn’t that much further away.
That said, things have improved enormously in the last 10 years. There is a vibrant downtown area, and fairly large pockets of redevelopment around it, with safe(-ish) and affordable housing.
To assholes yeah. I grew up in a pretty rural area and still drive through some holes in the wall regularly with traffic lights where I’m stopped and there’s no traffic in miles. I still stop because that light is there for a reason. To save lives by enforcing some consistency in the rules.
My wife is Arab, wears a headscarf. She stopped at a red light, cop car whips around to the side of her vehicle and told her that driving the vehicle she has will catch attention and get car jacked. They outright told her never to stop at that red light and the following three red lights on that road, day or night.
That’s pretty fuckin wild, but I believe it. Have gotten lost off 75 around Detroit and all of the burnt down homes and block boys weren’t too welcoming lol
Got stopped by cops walking back to the room while staying in Philly, walking from a music festival with a female friend in little more than a bikini. We were told not to continue walking our intended route, they made us chill and hire a ride…
Bruh… in California, Southern California (Inland Empire) and Northern California (the Bay), you could be walking through a wealthy neighborhood, one street over and it’s the fkin hood and it legit looks like a fkin hood. I can’t even wrap my head around it. At least in SE Michigan, you can see the gradual change from wealth to knocking on death’s door. Or at least from my experience.
It’s not that it’s unsafe to drive in Detroit due to crime, it’s just that the automotive industry lobbied hard to make the country car friendly, and that city faced the worst of it.
I’ve heard of this but never experienced it. I always got verners for an upset tummy… so now it’s basically ipecac for me. Can’t have any ginger ale now actually.
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