Dearborn Mayor Asks Residents to Reimagine City's Streets

Dearborn is taking a page from Detroit's experimentation with safer street redesign and calling on officials and residents to start imagining what their streets would look like if they could build them from scratch.

The city council has recently passed a $100 million budget earmarked to redesign 40 miles of the city's streets. That money's not just for repaving, according to Mayor Abdullah Hammoud. He's asking people to dream big.

“What would you do if you could start with a blank slate?” Hammoud told WDIV News.

Hammoud is floating ideas such as protected bicycle lanes, more trees, and slowing down traffic on some of the major arteries in town. Maybe even more trees. 

There is no timeline yet. No meetings are scheduled. But these are not radical ideas. Traffic calming, bike lanes and safer pedestrian access is already working in some areas of Detroit. Look at the stretch of Livernois along the "Avenue of Fashion."

The benefits of safer streets that are more accessible to feet and human-powered vehicles are innumerable. But one Dearborn resident summed it up succinctly. 

"I don't want to drive anymore," one Dearborn resident, 82, told WDIV News. "I'm afraid."

And that's it, right there. That's the whole reason behind redesigning streets. A person should not HAVE to drive if they don't want to. There should be options. Those options should include, but not be limited to, bicycle lanes. No one's talking about getting rid of cars. Street redesign is not an attack on the automobile. But the automobile is not the exclusive means of transportation, nor should it be. 

Cars are the Old White Men of transportation: They've had an inordinate amount of time at the top of the heap, and now it's time you stepped aside and shared the wealth a little. The world has changed, fella. 

Good for you, Dearborn.