When downtown isn't about people

Downtown Detroit is undergoing a renovation boom that's bringing new office space and housing to a long-suffering urban core. Despite the investment, however, the area seems almost hostile to people.

At 4 p.m. on a recent Wednesday the main streets were almost devoid of pedestrians.

While it's easy to be pessimistic about resuscitating Detroit, there's a more interesting lesson for Seattle and other cities that still prioritize mobility of cars over people.

During a recent visit to Detroit I saw gorgeous old buildings and lots of well-publicized new development. There's buzz about a rebirth in downtown, with new offices, hotels, stores and residents on the way.

Yet the area is dominated by interstates and thoroughfares that are designed to keep cars moving through downtown. The Renaissance Center complex housing General Motors' headquarters sits like a castle separated from the city with massive walls. Parking garages dominate many city blocks. Skybridges encourage people to stay inside and the city's people-mover transit system is designed to keep people separated from the streets at all costs.

The result is great mobilty between downtown and the suburbs, which have boomed through the decades while the metro area's core declined. Is it possible to reverse course?

In Seattle we're making some of the same mistakes. They may not seem as egregious as the 1950s planning decisions -- now we partially cover big highways with lids -- but they may be even worse considering that we know better.

For example, the $3 billion project to bury Seattle's viaduct freeway in a tunnel that bypasses downtown, without investment in transit or surface streets, doesn't help create a strong urban core.

Throughout the region we're promote sprawl by building bigger roads, not just fixing bottlenecks or safety problems. The suburban freeway I use to get to work is being expanded without adding tolls. The result encourages people and employers to locate further from the urban heart. Obviously Seattle isn't Detroit, but policies that skew investment to new suburbs at the expense of a vital core are similar.

Even improvements with an urban patina often are focused on cars rather than people -- think of the "towne center" developments in so many suburbs. Detroit's new Whole Foods is in a neighborhood near downtown that offers new lofts and offices. But a huge surface parking lot and a pair of 7-lane streets separates the store from other buildings, not to mention huge open spaces between its mixed use project and the next critical mass of people.

I don't mean to criticize the efforts of folks in Detroit to build a more vibrant city, in fact I hope the efforts attract more investment and the prosperity spreads. I wish other places could learn from their past mistakes rather than make them over again.