On Cars, Racism and Detroit

I was browsing Reddit this morning, as one does, and came across this fascinating map of Detroit, which geographically plots racial groups in and around the city based on 2020 census data.

Fascinating, I thought. I’d never seen racism so stark or represented so clearly before. But there it is, and it’s not easy to argue with. That’s what it looks like in real life too. Drop yourself in Ferndale, one of the most politically and culturally progressive little cities in America and you’ll see nary a black person anywhere.

And as I’m staring at this map wondering how this happens, it struck me: Cars.

No, I’m not saying cars caused racism. There are multitudes of reasons for this stark segregation, but one through line is the car. While cars may not have CAUSED racial segregation in Detroit, the auto certainly, and I think unquestioningly, enabled and maybe accelerated it, at least in terms of the 8 Mile Road boundary. Real estate redlining was real, and it is not to be discounted, for sure. Out and out racial violence is another.

Before mass automobile ownership, where you lived was much more closely tied to where you worked and whether you could get there by streetcar or on foot. The streetcar network (believe it or not, Detroit had one before 1920) connected neighborhoods and employment centers. Your residential choices were constrained by geography and transportation.

The automobile loosened those constraints. But not equally.

White families with the financial means to buy cars could move farther from the city and commute to their jobs in the city. Developers could build housing much farther from established employment centers. Employers could relocate manufacturing operations to suburban industrial corridors. Highway construction made those patterns easier to sustain.

Detroit, the Motor City, home of the Big Three automakers, a city built by, and for cars enabled the segregation that the city now is actively confronting. How?

Bike lanes, for one. Non-auto transportation and infrastructure for another.

Ride your bike up Livernois from around 7 Mile Road. You’ll find protected bike lanes on each side of the street until you get to 8 Mile. And what’s there? A marked bike lane that literally crosses the 8-lane, divided highway that used to separate Ferndale and all its whiteness from Detroit.

And all over the city, construction projects are connecting once-isolated neighborhoods with bike lanes. There are plans to expand the People Mover. Sterling Heights is considering a passenger rail line running hourly, connecting the Eastside suburbs to downtown. Detroit is even connecting countries with non-auto infrastructure. The bike lanes leading to the Gordie Howe Bridge, itself with a multi-use pathway for bikes and walkers alike right into Windsor, are fantastic and growing.

Increased attention to walkability, protected bike lanes, neighborhood commercial districts, access to parks and trails are things that older urban planning philosophies systematically neglected or undermined with its myopic focus on auto-centric infrastructure.

Detroit may always be the Motor City. But if current trends continue, and let’s hope they do, the singular emphasis on the car as the only means of transportation will come to an end, for the benefit of everyone.