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No urgency to fix storm damage to Rosa Parks Transit Center [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-08-13
Only poor sods without a proper car go to the Rosa Parks Transit Center, where they hope to catch buses managed by the Detroit Department of Transportation (D-DOT). And also the occasional journalists and photographers.
Apparently there are no photographers scheduled for the month of August, because a canopy damaged by a storm more than two weeks ago has still not been repaired.
Diagram of the Rosa Parks Transit Center. Each bus that comes into the center goes around in a loop in the direction marked by the red arrows in this diagram.
The transit center in downtown Detroit, named after civil rights leader Rosa Parks, consists of a more or less conventional building and a one-way loop encircling a waiting area with eleven “bays,” each designated for a specific bus route. All buses enter by Bay 11 on the north and drive south and maybe make the southern turn northward to stop at a designated bay. The inbound passengers debark, and the driver takes a break, usually in the building rather than on the bus. Then the driver comes back to the bus, the outbound passengers come aboard, and the driver takes the bus the rest of the way around the loop and goes past Bay 1 to exit the center.
The buses are supposed to come and go according to fixed schedules for regular weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays (there’s no special holiday schedule, the Sunday schedule is in effect for holidays). It happens frequently that a bus departs as scheduled. It also happens frequently that a bus departs a few minutes late, and unfortunately it also happens that a scheduled bus does not show up at all.
Sometimes people get fed up and call an Uber or a Lyft. A poor man’s time is still valuable. Paying about $20 or $30 for a ride share is in some cases preferable to wasting more time waiting for a bus that may or may not show up.
The least original thing a reporter in Detroit can do is write a story about taking the bus. Maybe he or she rides around the city on the buses for a full day, with no pressure to get to any particular place at a certain time. Then once he or she has enough for the report, call a colleague or a friend for a ride in a decent car, and dream of a Pulitzer.
The people waiting on buses in the transit center’s loop-encircled waiting area would be exposed to direct sun and rain if it weren’t for seven canopies that look like pairs of bells or flowers. But there was a major storm a couple of weeks ago, and the southernmost canopy was ripped.
Presumably a crew came by, tore off the canopy material that was hanging, applied some kind of emergency fastening and barricaded the area under the canopy. I took a few photos on July 29 in the afternoon, and followed up last Friday night.
Can’t see the AT & T building only because it’s covered by the dark of night.
The immediate danger has been mitigated and presumably the relevant people have been notified. Maybe the temporary fix can hold indefinitely.
But it’s not about that. In Bloomfield Hills, would they allow something like this to stand for more than a couple of weeks? I don’t think so. One week, maybe, not two.
Don’t know who to talk to about this. How about Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago Romero, the cardboard cutout representing Detroit’s City Council District 6? Someone from her staff will “review” my “concerns,” meaning nothing will happen as a result of my saying something about this.
Well, I did talk to her face to face yesterday, and she said “I’ll check it out.” So that’s a start, which may or may not be followed up with inquiries as to what’s holding up the more permanent repair.
As for Mayor Duggan, I can send schedule a face-to-face meeting with him by sending an e-mail to
[email protected]. To be fair, that’s not the actual e-mail address I was given, but the result was essentially the same.
Fixing that ripped canopy is hardly the biggest problem facing D-DOT. Getting the buses to run on time, or frequently enough that missing one doesn’t feel like a tragedy, that should be the higher priority.
What does D-DOT need? More vehicles? More drivers? More mechanics? More software developers to look into why the mobile device apps are frequently wrong about where the buses are at?
If only there was some agency called something like “Detroit at Work” or “Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation” or “Michigan Works” that would identify unemployed Detroiters with talent for driving buses, repairing buses or writing transit software, and just gave them those jobs. Sadly, no such agency exists.
And yet, maybe the ripped canopy should be fixed first. It’s kind of like with medical triage: maybe you treat the patient with a dislocated shoulder today and schedule the patient needing a heart transplant for the operating room tomorrow.
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/13/2186769/-No-urgency-to-fix-storm-damage-to-Rosa-Parks-Transit-Center
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