The recent Cleveland protests over the Ohio Department of Transportation ignoring cycling certain echoes recent experiences with MDOT. From their Fort Street project to a Michigan Avenue repaving to the I-94 expansion, MDOT is ignoring Detroit’s non-motorized transportation master plan — a topic on the agenda for the next MDOT Metro Region non-motorized meeting in March.

But back to Cleveland, their protest has a cool video and song. Maybe that’s what we need to better get our basic message out.

We don’t need non-credible excuses or a willingness to listen. We need a consistent commitment to make Detroit a better place to walk and bike.

MDOT is hosting four meetings to discuss their plans to rehabilitate widen I-94 through the heart of Detroit.

Yes, they basically ignored non-motorized transportation when initially designing the project.

Yes, they are permanently removing bridges (e.g. John R) that are critical to Detroit’s non-motorized transportation plan.

No, they are not willing to remedy this issue in the Midtown area.

The project’s price tag? $1.7 billion. That’s billion with a “b”.

We will post more on this projects’ deficits soon, but here is MDOT’s meeting schedule:

Eastside meetings

(Co-sponsored by Wayne County Commissioner Bernard Parker and the Detroit Eastside Community Collaborative)

Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010
2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m.
Wayne County Community College District ? Cooper Conference Room
5901 Conner Road, Detroit

Midtown meetings

Thursday, Jan. 28, 2010
9-11 a.m. and 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Cathedral Church of St. Paul ? Barth Hall (parking in back)
4800 Woodward Ave., Detroit

Special accommodations: 313-922-3311

There’s been a big push by many groups to get Green projects in the Obama economic stimulus package.  We’ve already mentioned the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s push.  The DNR Parks division has submitted about a quarter-million in infrastructure projects.  The Detroit Greenways Coalition has their trails submitted as well.

That’s all the good news.

The fear however is this stimulus package will also fund a significant amount of road expansion.

From Bloomberg.com:

While many states are keeping their project lists secret, plans that have surfaced show why environmentalists and some development experts say much of the stimulus spending may promote urban sprawl while scrimping on more green-friendly rail and mass transit.

“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”

And decentralizing/sprawl also hurts bikability and walkability.

Some local concerns involve planned expressway expansion, notably I-75 in Oakland County and I-94 in Detroit.  Neither project made financial sense long before the recent declines in vehicle miles traveled.  Now they make less sense.

And they’re certainly not green, but they might get in the stimulus package.

The I-94 project is especially bad in that it would remove nine bridges over the expressways — permanently blocking bicycle routes within Detroit’s non-motorized transportation master plan.

And because the highway expansion was planned before the non-motorized plan, MDOT is ignoring the latter.  However, reading their Final Environmental Impact Statement only shows that MDOT wasn’t going to let non-motorized priorities get in the way of an expressway expansion.

That said, there’s not too much we can do until MDOT’s economic stimulus list becomes public and we see what’s on the list.