Talking Michigan Transportation

The vital role of transportation in Detroit’s resurgence

• Season 7 • Episode 211

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On this week’s edition of the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast, a conversation with Sam Krassenstein, chief of infrastructure and Department of Public Works deputy director, for the City of Detroit. 

Krassenstein talks about many things, including the challenges of right-sizing streets built to accommodate more vehicles in an era before freeways were built, how safe mobility and accessibility play into the recovery of the city’s neighborhoods, and the innovative thinking going into the I-375 and US-12 (Michigan Avenue) projects.

Last May, Sen. Gary Peters invited Krassenstein to testify before the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Maritime, Freight and Ports on the subject of community solutions to the roadway safety crisis.

Krassenstein explains why this is so important as part of those efforts to right-size some streets and make for safer crossings.

Jeff Cranson:

Hello and welcome to the Talking Michigan Transportation podcast. I'm Jeff Cranson. After taking a hiatus from the podcast last week, I'm excited to share a conversation with Sam Krassenstein, who's playing a leading role in rethinking the infrastructure that is so vital to the resurgence of the city of Detroit. We touched on a lot of things how to right-size streets built to accommodate vehicles in a pre-freeway era, how safe mobility and accessibility play into the recovery of the city's neighborhoods, and the innovative thinking going into the I-375 and Michigan Avenue projects. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Once again, I'm with Sam Krassenstein, who's the Chief of Infrastructure and Department of Public Works Director for the City of Detroit. Sam, this is your first time on TMT, which nobody calls it but me, but it is transportation, so we have to have an acronym. Thanks for being here.

Sam Krassenstein:

Thanks for having me.

Jeff Cranson:

So talk first about your background and your career trajectory and you know what brought you to this position. Being kind of the point person on all things, mobility for Detroit.

Sam Krassenstein:

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So you know I'm not a Michigan native. I grew up in Pittsburgh and I went to school in Pennsylvania, at Bucknell, studying economics and management and finance, and so you know, I spent a few years working in Washington DC trying to figure out what I wanted to do and, like all people trying to figure out what they wanted to do, I decided to go back to grad school. So I was fortunate to be able to start grad school at Michigan doing my MBA program and my master's of urban planning, and while I was there I decided to. You know, while my friends were taking internships with Amazon and these you know large consulting companies and going to Wall Street, I decided to take an unpaid internship with the city of Detroit. It's a little atypical for an MBA at Michigan, so I started with the city in summer of 16, working with our public works team, and I really just had the opportunity to get to spend a lot of time in the field dealing with our operations, everything from how we do trash collection and manage illegal dumping to going out with our paving crews, seeing how we resurface streets, how we fill potholes, how we fix signs and signals, and I just found it really, really interesting. So at the end of the internship, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mayor Duggan and he offered me a part-time job on the spot to continue working for the city while I finished grad school. So for the next two years, I worked for the city part-time while I was doing my studies in Ann Arbor, commuting back and forth, and in 2018, I was able to join the city full time, just doing special projects in the infrastructure and transportation realm.

Sam Krassenstein:

Where I really found my sweet spot early on and where I found a gap that I thought we could be doing better on was around the area of utility coordination. Anytime we resurface a street, the problem we were seeing with the resurgence of Detroit is not only were we fixing the streets, but the utilities whether it's the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department or DTE or telecoms everyone wanted to make investments. So the issue we were running into which we hadn't run into in a long time was we resurfaced a street and sometimes, even before the project was done, we'd have a utility there with either permit work or planned work digging up our brand new pavement. So where I started focusing on early on is well, how do let's share our capital plans a few years out, so we can make sure that we're doing this work in a way that like, makes sense. And sometimes that means we really coordinate the work and we do it together, and other times it just means that we're doing it in the right order. So I have the opportunity.

Sam Krassenstein:

I'm sorry.

Jeff Cranson:

No, I was just going to say that's great because the mantra has been dig once for a long time, but it's it's harder than it sounds because of that coordination. So I really appreciate that you're focusing on that.

Sam Krassenstein:

Yeah, it's super hard to solve issues that different agencies have different budget constraints for when they can spend money, how flexible they can be, where they're going to be in the road, what's their method of construction. So, you know, adopting a dig once philosophy is really good in principle, but in practice it's often, like you know, even just sharing plans to know, hey, are we going to be working in the same part of the road or can we at least wait to do the surface part of the project that the whole public sees and do our little bits of underground separately, even if it's not technically dig once. So you know, we made a lot of progress on that front and then in 2021, with the passage of the you know, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the mayor asked me to step up into this role of chief of infrastructure, having one point person that's going to be focused laser focused on the infrastructure bill, bring funding back to the city and making sure we have a really strong project pipeline.

Sam Krassenstein:

So I've been able to work across all the different departments that deal with transportation and infrastructure at the city and have been able to work really closely with MDOT over the last few years on all their great projects that are also happening within Detroit. So for the last few years I've been doing that. We've been really successful in winning awards ourselves and then partnering with MDOT on bringing funding back to the city, including, like our, you know, $25 million raise grant for Michigan Avenue, the $105 million we got through the Infra grant for the 375 project, the Reconnecting Communities Planning grants for the 75 freeway cap project and a bunch of other ones where we've been just really successful in attracting all this funding so that we could do really cool transportation projects that are long overdue within the city.

Jeff Cranson:

Let's talk a little later about some of those specific projects. I wanted first, as part of our table setting here, you talked about your education and what brought you to transportation from kind of the urban planning side, but it seems like from following you that you've developed this real passion for safe mobility for all users. Can you talk about what informs that?

Sam Krassenstein:

Absolutely, and so you know one of my first real exposures to this, you know, apart from living in DC, which is my first time living in like a big city. I grew up in suburban Pittsburgh, but living in DC gave me exposure to like what an urban environment can and should be like. We were doing a transportation planning class and one of our projects was to pick a segment of road or pick an intersection that we thought could be safer and to develop a plan for how you would make it safer and to interview people what's their perception of safety, and it was really eye-opening, just seeing, like, just understanding. Well, what are those tools? What goes into transportation planning and traffic engineering? There's a whole world I had not appreciated and how appreciative, how divisive a field it is as well. You ask three transportation planners or traffic engineers on what's a way to make a particular intersection safer, you may get three different answers. You may get three different answers.

Sam Krassenstein:

So one of the areas I became really attuned to working in the city is the dangerous driving and really unsafe nature of our streets. So in 2018, we formed this group, our Complete Streets team, that started to build out what we call our high injury network, really analyze what is the safety of our roadways, and what we found out is, you know, we have the unenviable position of having the second highest fatality rate in the whole country for vehicle-related crashes, and especially for pedestrians. And you start peeling that back, and there's a lot of reasons for that. One is that we have a disproportionately high number of people that don't have access to a car, that rely on alternative forms of transportation, whether it's, you know, taking the bus or walking or biking, and our transportation setup is just really not designed, as Detroit reaches its peak population in the 50s, with a population of near 2 million people, and our road network reflects that.

Sam Krassenstein:

And so we have a lot of roads in which the cross-section has really not changed over the last, like 50, 60, 70 years, where you have roads that are designed for way more cars than are actually out there today. And when we have these streets that are overbuilt, it causes people to drive faster. It's really hard for people to pay attention to a 30 mile an hour speed limit when the road is seven lanes wide and there's not much traffic. A 30 mile an hour speed limit when the road is seven lanes wide and there's not much traffic. You find yourself very easily, even if you're not trying to speed. You find it very natural to drive 50 plus miles an hour and meanwhile you have people trying to cross the street where the bus drops them off, and it's a recipe for people getting hit.

Jeff Cranson:

This has probably occurred to you that everything you're talking about was trying to accommodate the shrinkage of the city, and now you're seeing growth again. So do you wonder sometimes if, if you lose some of that capacity, if you're going to wish you had it back.

Sam Krassenstein:

I don't think so and the reason for that is I think people travel a lot differently now than they, than they did in the past, than they did in the past and, realistically, even though we're back on the growth trajectory here, our streets were very well built for really good levels of service even when we had 2 million people. So even on a growth trajectory here we're back up, we gained a couple hundred thousand people. What we have today that we did not have when a lot of these roads were built is like we have the freeway system. So when a lot of the roads, like, particularly like the larger trunk lines like Gratiot and Grand River and Woodward, were constructed, there was no I-94 or I-96 or 75.

Sam Krassenstein:

Those were the primary ways in and out of the city and as those freeways were constructed, they, those trunk lines, really did not change a whole lot in terms of, like, how many lanes there were and what they're being used for. They just are, I don't want to say the relics of the past, but there are things that have you know, that were built and have really, you know, stayed throughout the test of time, and now those are areas where we're really focusing, where the capacity exists, on our overall network in the city, even if we have tremendous growth. We're just kind of shifting like well, how do those people get around?

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, that's a really good point, and obviously we'll talk a little bit too about how public transportation can factor into this. But I'm very excited, as a Michigan native, about all the great things happening in Detroit. It has to be a fun time for you to be there. Obviously, infrastructure and mobility factor into the resurgence, but I think it's interesting that the structure begun in 1973 was named the Renaissance Center and now the city is in a true renaissance and the Renaissance Center's future is in peril. That probably hasn't lost on you.

Sam Krassenstein:

There's definitely some irony there, but it's the evolution of a city. I think it makes sense that as the city grows and evolves, there are things that will change with that, and some of those things are really hard things, things that people have a lot of nostalgia, things that are iconic. Where the city's going, they no longer meet the needs and like it's going to be a really hard problem to solve. And whatever solution they come up with for the Renaissance Center, it's guaranteed that not everyone is going to be happy. There's no way, there's no solution that would everyone that you come up with a solution for something like that that you know everyone thinks, hey, this is the best possible thing that could be done. There's always going to be people that have, you know, differing views.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah well, in talking to you. I'm really impressed with how quickly you've learned so much about the city and I'm interested in your thoughts about the recovery in neighborhoods like Corktown, where I always wonder who's buying those really cool condos or Midtown or Lafayette Park or Grand Mount Rosedale. Is it younger generations, you think, choosing urban life, or is it empty nesters seeking the vibe, or all of the above?

Sam Krassenstein:

I think it's a little bit of both. So you know our family. We live on the east side of Detroit, over in the Indian Village area and for us like you know, for me working for the city, it was important for us that, if we're working for the city, that we live in the city to, you know, represent our constituents and to really live the you know more urban lifestyle here and what we've seen, like in our neighborhood and just around the neighborhood we're seeing a ton of younger families that are moving in the city that like the idea of being close to the riverfront, like the idea of being downtown and, you know, feel like it's a very safe and comfortable place to be, where you know there's not a lot of cities where you know you can buy a house affordably and like live 10 minutes from the core of the downtown, and so there's a lot that. There's a lot to be offered here for the younger groups and as these like larger corridors, like on Michigan Avenue for Corktown or any of the streetscape projects the city has done to spur economic development, we're seeing those neighborhoods come back, one of the really cool projects that we're really trying to get into the neighborhoods on is the development of the Joe Lewis Greenway, which is a 30-mile on and off street greenway that creates a ring around the city, going all the way from the riverfront all the way to the west side in Dearborn, where we're creating this really great. It's basically like a rails to trails program where we're taking this abandoned rail infrastructure, these properties that have been blighted for decades, and we're turning it back to productive use, where we're creating these really nice play spaces and green spaces and greenways for people to get around.

Sam Krassenstein:

For that solve a couple of purposes. One is, you know, removing the blight, which is huge for bringing those neighborhoods back. The second is for transportation to be able to give people a safe way to be able to get around the city, not on the street. And the third is, you know, creating these like recreation spaces that you know, people have easy access to park space. And what we're already starting to see is like, as the Greenway comes together, as we're constructing different parts of it, the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the greenways are coming back with it. So we're seeing investment in the housing stock, we're seeing that people just want to go and like be in these neighborhoods where you know. It would have been a different story five to 10 years ago with what the state of these areas were. So we're seeing the neighborhood investments really come back and that's purely a function of the transportation systems that we're building alongside them.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, no, I think t hat's a really good point. It's just, it's really cool to see I mean that culture with modern needs. And so that brings me to some of the projects and some of your priority initiatives. Maybe we can spend a minute on each of these, but let's talk first about Michigan Avenue and how rethinking Michigan Avenue factors into what's going on in that neighborhood.

Sam Krassenstein:

Well, it's a project that's definitely well overdue. Anyone who's driven down Michigan Avenue in Corktown knows it's a bumpy ride. So we know that there has to be some kind of investment into the streets and with Ford buying the Michigan Central Station and just doing a beautiful job rehabbing that in addition to all the other investments that have been happening on the corridor, the timing's right to really rethink well, how does Michigan Avenue as one of these large trunk lines operate? And so it's been a little bit of a bumpy road, figuring out what is in the best interest of the residents and the neighborhood and everything, and getting a lot of really good points of feedback. We started on this idea that we were going to create a dedicated autonomous vehicle lane and as the technology developed, pretty quickly it became apparent well, avs are really not going to use dedicated lanes, and so we started to rethink our design and well, what accomplishes the most of the needs here?

Sam Krassenstein:

And we landed on a really good project that's going to really narrow down Michigan Avenue into a way that makes it a lot more walkable, a lot more pedestrian friendly. We're adding space for sidewalk cafes, we're adding better bike facilities, we're reconstructing the road, so it's going to last another generation and we're saving a good amount of the historic bricks out there to be reused in the streetscape facade to really give it a sense of place. And the timing of it really makes a lot of sense with what's happening at Michigan Central, with some of the news to the west, with the future of the DCFC soccer team, and it's all coming together in a relatively short period of time where the road really is going to serve as the backbone that connects the commercial neighborhoods in Corktown with the residences to the south, the new housing stock that's being built north of 75. It's really cool to see all those different elements coming together over the next like three or four years here.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah well, I think Michigan Avenue is a case in point of you know the observation you made about the rents and that it's really going to be hard to get a complete consensus and no matter what you do, somebody is going to be unhappy. But I think you're making strides and you're working very closely with the MDOT team. They're trying to accommodate as many people as possible.

Sam Krassenstein:

Yeah, I mean, change is hard. On any project that we do, there's always the you know it's a fear of the unknown and like a complacency with how things are. Like things aren't perfect, but we've lived with it, so why are you messing with it? Well, we're messing with it because, from our point of view as transportation experts, there are things that like don't work well but we think could work a lot better, and the you know, the road infrastructure of 50, 60, 70 years ago is not the needs of today, and so we're continuing to make progress on that. And it's you know, it's a challenge every step of the way, but it's a good challenge.

Sam Krassenstein:

This is the. Change should be hard because, like it forces us to ask hard questions and to get feedback like that. That forces us to, you know, really reevaluate what we think about, like what the right answer is, Because, even though you know we're the transportation experts here, we don't know everything. There's a lot of input that we need throughout the process for every one of our projects to make sure we're designing the right thing that actually meets the needs of the people that live and work and play there.

Jeff Cranson:

Stay with us. We'll have more on the other side of.

MDOT Announcement:

In Michigan, safety comes first on the roads. To combat distracted driving, Michigan passed the Hands-Free Law. The law makes holding or manually using a cell phone or other mobile electronic device while operating a vehicle a primary offense.

MDOT Announcement:

This means an officer can stop and ticket you for violating the law.

MDOT Announcement:

This can include, but not limited to, sending or receiving a call, sending, receiving or reading a text or email, accessing, reading or posting to social media sites or entering locations into the phone GPS.

MDOT Announcement:

With this law in place, drivers are encouraged to stay focused, keeping their hands on the wheel and their attention on the road. Drive smart, drive safe, drive hands-free.

MDOT Announcement:

Michigan's hands-free law, making the road safer for everyone.

Jeff Cranson:

Let's talk about the ongoing efforts. In this effort, you guys at the city, you and your colleagues are working really closely with MDOT officials and the private consultants who are working on converting I-375 from a stub freeway into an urban boulevard that tries to capture what it was originally as a surface street and the vitality of the neighborhoods. You've heard it over and over again and I've been saying this back since we started talking about this in 2013, that we can't undo the sins of the past. We can't recreate Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, but as part of this, we can certainly pay homage to them and their history and the culture, but also create something that's exciting for the people who live in the neighborhood and connects them to downtown, as you talked about. You know, being close to that core downtown is one of the really thrilling things about this resurgence of Detroit. So how do you feel about the 375 project and where it's at now?

Sam Krassenstein:

I mean, I'm really excited about it as a transportation guy. I think it's really cool. I actually spent, I was up to, like you know, 12, one o'clock last night just reviewing the base plans before they were due. You know, our first set of comments were due back today, so I was really into it. Last night we had actually the meeting I was coming to. Right before this we were talking about our next public meeting, which is going to be in early April, the historical context and the displacement of the residents and businesses in Black Bottom.

Sam Krassenstein:

Just from a pure transportation perspective, it is a really cool and interesting project and so I try to consistently look at it through that lens on, like you know, what are the transportation features that are going to change. So, like the project really has, I would say, two main elements. One is the boulevard aspect we're moving 375. We're bringing it up to grade and we're making a much more urban street, which should result in meaningful development with new properties being put online, much better connectivity between downtown and Lafayette Park, between downtown and Eastern Market, in between all these neighborhoods in the riverfront. But the other really interesting part of this is, like the whole 75 interchange, and so I think that this is just going to be so much safer and so much more logical for people that are coming downtown.

Sam Krassenstein:

So you think about your experience coming down I-75 today and if you're driving down 75, you know that you're constantly dealing with weaving traffic people getting on at the max exit that are coming across to go down 375.

Sam Krassenstein:

Whereas you have people coming down 75 that are going the opposite way, just to continue to points further south downriver or wherever they might be going on 75. South downriver or you know wherever they might be going on 75. And like, as a result, there's always crashes, there's always backups and it's like you know it's a little bit of white knuckle driving, maybe not as bad as like I-94, but it's still like you really have to have your wits about you. And so one of the cool things about this is like it's just going to make a much more logical experience for people that are traveling on the freeway, that are coming downtown. And I think it's going to be a little bit confusing at first as all changes, but I think the benefits of it just from being able to move easily around the city, whether you're on foot, getting across on the bridges above or driving on the on the freeway below. I think it's going to end up making a lot more sense for a lot of people pretty quickly, and so I think that part of it is really cool.

Jeff Cranson:

Yeah, I agree with you completely, and you get the podcast gold star for calling them crashes, which is appropriate.

Sam Krassenstein:

As a safety guy, that's number one. Our mantra is that all crashes are avoidable.

Jeff Cranson:

Yes, absolutely good for you. We should have a whole podcast on that sometime.

Sam Krassenstein:

I would love to just talk about safety.

Jeff Cranson:

Well, just for a minute here, as we get to the close, I do want to talk to you about last May. Senator Peters invited you to testify before the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, maritime Freight and Ports. That's a mouthful, but you got to go to the subcommittee hearing entitled Examining the Roadway Safety Crisis and Highlighting Community Solutions. Just could you summarize quickly the gist of your testimony and how that went?

Sam Krassenstein:

The experience, the opportunity to be able to go to our nation's capital to testify before senators is, like it's just a really cool experience to sit in there and, like you know, see people you see up on the news and see, like you know, people you have a lot of respect for, like Gary Peters, right in front of you, asking you questions and asking for your opinion. You know what you think about the road safety crisis and so, like that number one, first and foremost, like I was truly humbled to be there and to be able to represent Detroit, the state of Michigan. You know, the biggest part of what I wanted to get across is the value of having funding that can be geared towards safety. So, with my testimony, I talked a lot about the Gratiot Corridor, M-3, between 8 Mile and Downtown, and it's, you know, one of these like larger trunk lines that I mentioned earlier, but it also happens to be our most dangerous.

Sam Krassenstein:

So we have streets like Gratiot where, in a given year, we may have 10 fatalities and 100 serious injuries on like that 8 Mile stretch of road. And so for us, like we have a lot of roads that are like that and so having this dedicated safe streets funding, which we've been really fortunate to. You know, have received about $60 million from USDOT that we're investing in nothing but safety, and so that's going to include doing things like more mid-block crossings, having protected parking, doing centerline hardening and doing things that really get to the goal of reducing speeds. We've all heard the saying speed kills, and so when we have these larger roads where people are driving 50, 60 miles an hour, we're much more likely to have these outcomes of having fatalities and serious injuries. So being able to have that funding that we can gear towards driving down speeds and creating safer roadways was the biggest part of what my goal was with being able to testify before some of the senators.

Jeff Cranson:

Do you remember any of the questions or comments? Did you have much back and forth?

Sam Krassenstein:

There was a little bit. A lot of the focus of that hearing ended up shifting a little bit more to autonomous and electric vehicles, and so it was a little bit back and forth on what questions we were talking about, you know, pure road safety and ones that were talking more towards autonomous vehicles. Getting into like with, like electric vehicles well, you know, do we need to be changing the design of our roadways based on the weight of electric vehicles? Very important question. And then getting into like the you know the safety merits of autonomous vehicles but at the end of the day, autonomous or, you know, normal vehicles, you still have the infrastructure to deal with and, like having automated vehicles solves part of that. That, but the infrastructure is still kind of the key underlying piece. So that was kind of the key message that I tried to get across is how important updating that infrastructure is to dealing with road safety. Uh, yes, like the vehicles and the driver behavior is one, but you can't pretend that the, the engineering and the design of the roads doesn't play a major factor in it yeah, I haven haven't talked about AVs on the podcast in some time.

Jeff Cranson:

ou a while that was really the buzz and I'm still amazed, when I talk to people about this, that if you ask many people they'll be like, no, I'm not ready for that, I don't trust the vehicle, I don't trust the computer. And I'll say, well, do you have lane assist on your car? And they'll say, well, do you have lane assist on your car? And they'll say, yeah, yeah, that's helpful. You have a backup camera. Yeah, do you have automatic braking? You know, yeah, I have all those things. Those are all great. But well then, you know it's when you put all that together, that's what's going to make an autonomous vehicle or an automated vehicle.

Jeff Cranson:

It's kind of the stone soup metaphor you know of how these things build up and you don't even realize where you're getting. So I hope that mindset starts to change as the technology improves. Every time there was a crash early on, it made headlines. Oftentimes it was the vehicle being piloted by a driver that caused the crash, but that gets lost, as you know. So tell me quickly what your thoughts are about that.

Sam Krassenstein:

I mean no question. The features that go into autonomous vehicles have saved lives and will save lives and I say this with full disclosure that I drive a car with no technology whatsoever. My primary vehicle is a 2008 Ford Crown Victoria, so it's about as low-tech as you can get.

Jeff Cranson:

But having said that, that's like an old cop car.

Sam Krassenstein:

It is. It's a former federal vehicle that I bought as a used car when I was doing my commute back and forth from Ann Arbor and, you know, 10 years later it's still running strong, with 150,000 miles on it. Wow yeah, emergency braking, backup cameras each piece of those, even if it doesn't result in full autonomy, it results in you have fewer you know fewer crashes and fewer incidents that are happening that result in injuries and deaths. And so I think, like we're definitely on the right track with getting these safety features. Even if it doesn't ultimately culminate in a vehicle that you know purely drives itself from point A to point B, we're still making headwinds on these safety features that are going to save lives.

Jeff Cranson:

Thanks a lot for doing this, and we could talk forever I think about these things. Your passion really is great. I'm really happy that you're here. I'm happy you're in Detroit because you're there at a good time and clearly care about the city and the people, so that's awesome.

Sam Krassenstein:

Me too, I'm happy to be here. Maybe next time we talk we can talk more trains. Next episode.

Jeff Cranson:

So, sam, thanks again for being here. Thanks for all you're doing for the city. I really appreciate it. I appreciate your passion and good luck in your future endeavors,

Sam Krassenstein:

Thanks for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Cranson:

I'd like to thank you once more for tuning in to Talking Michigan Transportation. You can find show notes and more on Apple Podcasts or Buzzsprout. I also want to acknowledge the talented people who help make this a reality each week, starting with Randy Debler, who skillfully edits the audio, Jesse Ball, who proofs the content, Courtney Bates, who posts the podcast to various platforms, and Jacke Salinas, who transcribes the audio to make it accessible to all.