If Northville can ban cars downtown, what other cities in Detroit could follow suit?

Recently, I tweeted out a story that said Northville, an affluent suburb of Detroit, had voted to permanently make its downtown off-limits to cars. Very quickly, it became the most viral tweet I’ve ever sent. That says nothing particularly interesting about me; I merely passed along a story my father had sent me to the broader internet.

What it does say that is interesting is that there’s a huge and receptive audience for reclaiming our public spaces from the tyranny of the automobile — even here in the Motor City.

Detroit suburb of Northville votes to keep downtown streets permanently closed to car traffic https://t.co/LowWu5JMAj

— Sven Gustafson 🇺🇦 (@sveng) August 5, 2022

The almost entirely positive reaction suggests that people want more opportunities to live and move about outside of their cars — and be safe from being struck down by them. (It’s perhaps no coincidence that this is happening at a time when pedestrian fatalities are at a 40-year high, with 7,485 recorded in 2021.)

Echoing what several people said about their own communities, the tweet got me thinking: If Northville, a conservative-leaning bedroom community with a small, walkable downtown, can do it, what other local cities could muster the vision — and the courage — to make their central business districts pedestrian-only, off limits to cars, trucks and SUVs, here in this sprawling, car-dependent megalopolis?

Ferndale

In theory, Ferndale would seem to be a perfect candidate for a car-free downtown. It has a popular downtown and a progressive city government that has installed miles of protected bike lanes and pushed a road diet plan for Woodware Avenue that will see the busy thoroughfare go from four lanes in each direction to three, with broadened, landscaped sidewalks and bike lanes protected from traffic by a row of parking spaces.

Unfortunately, downtown Ferndale’s small size and orientation along two heavily-trafficked roads probably rules out a large-scale closure to vehicular traffic. Woodward is a state trunkline, meaning any closure would have to be approved by the Michigan Department of Transportation. Does anyone really think MDOT is going to approve closing it off to vehicles?

And would we even want to? Opponents of the road diet make the preposterous claim that it will funnel traffic into the adjacent neighborhoods as drivers look to bypass the congestion they believe will result from the narrowing of the road. It’s an absurd argument. Based on traffic volumes that the city carefully studied, Woodward will remain by far the fastest north-south route through the city, even as the road diet may force drivers to slow down during peak traffic times. But closing Woodward off altogether, at Nine Mile, would undeniably route all that traffic volume into the neighborhoods. It would be a nightmare. Much of the traffic on Woodward, after all, is simply passing through Ferndale, not stopping here. Where else would it go?

Nine Mile probably isn’t an option, either, as anyone who has spent time strolling it, or worked in the lobby of the public library, can attest. It attracts a surprisingly steady amount of crosstown traffic.

In the end, downtown Ferndale’s geography along these two busy thoroughfares probably ends the discussion. The best the city could hope for might be to close off parts of East and West Troy Streets — I’ll note there’s a pedestrian plaza right outside The Dot parking garage and its street-level storefronts, which is a neat kind of irony — and maybe Vester Street, where a multi-use residential building is proposed to be built on what is today a surface parking lot.

Bottom line? Ferndale is a relatively pedestrian-friendly oasis tightly constrained by car culture, with limited options. It would take some real creativity to envision a plan that would work.

Royal Oak

I’m not always sure what city leaders are thinking when it comes to downtown Royal Oak. In winter, plows leave big ridges of snow that block crosswalks at intersections, bicycling infrastructure is often no more than sharrows painted on the pavement, and the city’s new on-street parking system, which combines complicated digital parking meters with a new back-in parking scheme that leaves some streets looking like a car show, is widely loathed, including by business owners.

That said, I genuinely like downtown Royal Oak, despite the city’s often questionable stewardship of the place. The sidewalks are pleasant and bustling, there’s an appealing mix of stores to browse in, the weekly farmers market is a treasure and the redevelopment of its civic campus has added a wonderful new park to the mix. Crews recently installed median curbed islands on Main Street, which might help calm traffic and make crossing the four-lane street safer.

Royal Oak’s downtown is also much larger than Ferndale’s, and it isn’t as constrained by traffic-flow considerations. It’s hard to see the city interrupting north-south traffic on Main Street, but less so on Washington Avenue, which sees less traffic, or on Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In fact, the block of Fifth Avenue east of Washington is already closed to vehicular traffic. Why not add a few more blocks to make it more welcoming for pedestrians?

Detroit

Anyone who’s been downtown on a busy weekend night, when there are sporting events, live concerts and other events competing for attention, knows what a traffic-clogged hellscape it can be. Downtown Detroit would be improved immeasurably with fewer cars.

Detroit’s central business district has long been oriented to the automobile. Today, an astonishing 40% of the land downtown is devoted to parking, either for surface lots or massive high-rise parking decks. Entire blocks are essentially dead zones of parking. After the demise of the city’s streetcar system in the mid-1900s, the automobile became the primary means of accessing the central business district. The city’s painful decline, which started around the same time the streetcars stopped rolling, only increased the need to give people, many of whom didn’t live in the city, quick and easy access in and (especially) out of it. Finally, the CBD is quite literally circumscribed by sunken freeways on three sides.

Today, revitalization and gentrification (call it what you want) are converting much of the downtown building stock over to residential, adding a 24-hour component to a downtown that never had many residents, even during its industrial-era peak. That’s a good thing.

But Detroit remains heavily dependent on the disposable income of non-residents who come down to eat dinner, catch a Tigers game, see a show or festival, even do some retail shopping. True, those people could catch a bus, or ride the QLine, but they largely don’t. They pilot their Grand Wagoneers down I-75 and pay as much as $40 to park in the District Detroit an Olympia Entertainment-owned parking lot. Those people would revolt if suddenly the entire downtown was off limits to motor vehicles. So would big employers like General Motors, DTE and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, each of which have huge parking footprints in the area.

It would be better to take a cue from the pedestrian plaza that opened several years back at the foot of Woodward, where Dan Gilbert has installed year-round programming that links cleverly via landscaped pathway to Campus Martius. Maybe that’s a great place to start; why not close off Cadillac Square next? It already sees lots of programming, including the Christmas popup retail market. Harmonie Park/Paradise Valley and Capitol Park seem like other obvious candidates, with narrow streets that have limited value in moving traffic already.

But a wholesale conversion of downtown Detroit as a pedestrian oasis is simply not feasible without a much larger culture shift away from cars, trucks and SUVs. I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Where else?

Someone responded that it seemed ironic that a small suburb like Northville could ban cars from its downtown, but the more I thought about it, maybe it’s actually easier for them than big cities like Detroit. There’s less critical mass of vehicles to contend with, only the opinions of local residents and the occasional out-of-town visitors. Northville got a head start banning cars during COVID, and downtown business owners and city officials apparently liked what they saw. If banning cars were bad for business, there’s no way the city would allow it to continue.

So what other Detroit-area downtowns, few and far between though they may be around here, are ripe for the picking?

Dearborn and Clawson are both limited for the same reasons as Ferndale. But what about Plymouth, which is already oriented around a central park and is situated along relatively lightly trafficked streets? Or Mount Clemens, or Utica? Could Rochester do it? What about tiny downtown Farmington, perched along a little-traveled section of Grand River Avenue? Birmingham, too, might present some good options.

What are your thoughts? Leave ‘em in the comments below.

Feature photo by Keith Ewing