Thanks to all who joined us in-person or virtually for our March Transit Tuesday Talk on connecting all of Wayne County!
TRU was joined by speakers including Deputy Wayne County Executive Assad Turfe, SMART’s VP of Planning Jordan VonZynda, Canton Senior Planner Erin Schlutow, and Westland City Council President Mike McDermott. Special thanks to our speakers and Westland City Hall for hosting.
The event featured presentations from each of the speakers followed by a Q&A. Read some of the highlights from our speakers below:
“We’ve partnered with HMTV to look at the existing conditions— where are people going and what do travel patterns look like? What does the market analysis say is need for making these connections? With that hard data and then having a lot of conversations with communities we developed some service concepts” SMART’s VP of Planning Jordan VonZynda said.
“Transit is essentially the key to unlocking everything else. Ultimately we gotta get people to work, gotta get people to their doctors appointments, to their jobs,” Wayne County Executive Assad Turfe said. “There was a time when if you didn’t own a car it’s because you couldn’t afford to own a car and you used transit— those times no longer exist. There’s a generation of people now that just don’t want to own cars”
“It’s important that we get this past the finish line, because we are taking a risk. We are taking a risk because if it fails we’re also all out. We’re either gonna be all in or we’re going to be all out,” Turfe said.
“Transit doesn’t stop at anything municipal boundaries, right, people want to get going they want to move and they wan to move fluidly and easily through the communities in the region. So what we decided to start doing is putting together a consortium project and we named it the Moving Together Western Wayne County Public Strategy. This project is about planning and preparing” Canton Senior Planner Erin Schlutow said.
Weren’t able to attend? You can watch the full program down below!