February 7, 2010 | By MIKE HALE
The biggest jolt in “Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City” comes as the director of Madrid’s subway and light-rail system talks about the importance of infrastructure. (Maybe “jolt” is too strong.) Discussing Spain’s ambitious high-speed rail system, he says countries that neglect their infrastructure experience “a slow decline in importance and their weight in the world.” Cut to Detroit’s imposing Michigan Central Station, sitting in abandoned, broken-windowed splendor. It doesn’t look like decline — it looks like whatever comes next.
This new installment of PBS’s “Blueprint America” project, Monday night on most stations, is about plans to revitalize Detroit by reviving its once thriving but now nearly nonexistent public transportation system (which was, of course, destroyed by the hometown auto industry). But despite all the earnest talk of light rail getting people back downtown, what lingers are the eerily quiet images of the former Motor City.
It’s one thing to know that Detroit’s population is half what it was in the 1950s. It’s quite another to see the scruffy green acres within the city limits, block after block of what used to be neighborhoods and now are weed patches and incipient forests, devoid of people unless they’ve bedded down in the tall grass where we can’t see them.
As the city dissolves back into the landscape, analysts discuss the possibility of forcing the few still living in the empty zones to move into more densely populated areas so the city can cut back on utilities and police services. Others advocate large-scale urban farming.
There’s much more to the 90-minute program than simply cataloging Detroit’s woes. It offers a history of national transportation planning in the United States — yes, it ends with the Interstate System — and presents the counterexample of the Spanish AVE system, which in less than 20 years has linked the country from north to south and fostered economic development in the cities it serves (at a cost of increased national debt and higher taxes).
So much ground is covered — the Gallatin Plan, the Erie Canal, the transcontinental railroad, car culture, the 1967 riots, white flight, green technology — that the actual plans for light rail and a new transportation hub in Detroit don’t get all that much screen time.
An earlier “Blueprint America” program, “Road to the Future,” had the same problem, giving a quick once-over to transit issues in New York, Denver and Portland, Ore. In Detroit’s case, perhaps details are avoided because the notion that improved public transportation can address problems rooted in fundamental economic shifts and race and class divides seems iffy at best.
The program keeps returning to those Spanish trains, humming along at 155 to 185 miles an hour, well above the 150 that Amtrak’s Acela achieves for a few miles here and there. It doesn’t get into the factors — shorter distances, more empty space — that make the construction of such a system easier in Spain than it would be here. But the case it’s making has more to do with political will and national priorities.
“Beginning in the 1980s, in the United States it was perceptible that things were beginning to deteriorate, that the maintenance of those infrastructures was getting worse and that the network didn’t evolve in any way to keep pace with the country,” a former Spanish economy secretary says by way of a coda. “And in the 1990s, in terms of infrastructure, it was a country that had fallen behind the standards of any European country.” O.K., maybe not Albania. But we get the point.
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