Ypsilanti - state highway

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Gav
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Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by Gav »

they made some permanent alterations so they could make a test track...

looks interesting.

https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot ... 0740_7.pdf

https://goo.gl/maps/LPEFq1oNsdtP1fTH6

https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdot ... 5708_7.pdf

quite some doing that
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Truvelo
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by Truvelo »

So they pinched one carriageway to turn it into part of a test track for self driving cars. There's also a traffic light junction and a roundabout painted to test the cars in an urban environment. They are obviously taking the future of autonomous vehicles very seriously.
How would you like your grade separations, Sir?
Big and complex.
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Gav
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by Gav »

Truvelo wrote: Sun Jan 02, 2022 23:05 So they pinched one carriageway to turn it into part of a test track for self driving cars. There's also a traffic light junction and a roundabout painted to test the cars in an urban environment. They are obviously taking the future of autonomous vehicles very seriously.
indeed its been a lot of effort to get buy in and its a reasonable sized proving ground, and an attempt to have an automotive focus in ann arbour
WHBM
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

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This is in classic US "Rust Belt" declining industry territory. The location at Willow Run/Ypsilanti, west of Detroit, Michigan, is the old WW2 bomber factory, largest aircraft factory in the world at the time, which produced aircraft from various designers but was actually managed and run by Ford. After the war it passed ironically to General Motors, and was long a mainstream assembly location for them, but gradually ran down, and was closed. Various attempts to remarket the buildings and the whole site have come to little, and it's now mostly just a cleared brownfield site.

The various sweeping 3-level grade separated junctions seen on the drawings just date from those factory times, giving multiple entries into the vast car parks that surrounded the factories, and had fallen into complete disuse, while the main road which has been reduced now carries a small fraction of what it once did, so no real issue to close up and fence off one well-separated side, and use the ready-made carriageway for a different purpose.
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KeithW
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by KeithW »

WHBM wrote: Mon Jan 03, 2022 23:41 This is in classic US "Rust Belt" declining industry territory. The location at Willow Run/Ypsilanti, west of Detroit, Michigan, is the old WW2 bomber factory, largest aircraft factory in the world at the time, which produced aircraft from various designers but was actually managed and run by Ford. After the war it passed ironically to General Motors, and was long a mainstream assembly location for them, but gradually ran down, and was closed. Various attempts to remarket the buildings and the whole site have come to little, and it's now mostly just a cleared brownfield site.

The various sweeping 3-level grade separated junctions seen on the drawings just date from those factory times, giving multiple entries into the vast car parks that surrounded the factories, and had fallen into complete disuse, while the main road which has been reduced now carries a small fraction of what it once did, so no real issue to close up and fence off one well-separated side, and use the ready-made carriageway for a different purpose.

Detroit is a disaster area and not just in terms of manufacturing over 25% of the city has simply been abandoned. Even the street lights are no longer connected.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.41874 ... a=!3m1!1e3
WHBM
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by WHBM »

KeithW wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 20:52
Detroit is a disaster area and not just in terms of manufacturing over 25% of the city has simply been abandoned. Even the street lights are no longer connected.
I need to visit "Detroit" from time to time. And this is true. However, for those industries there that remain, they do well - provided they stay outside the city limits. It's an issue in other US cities, but very prominent here. Michigan state has actually done significantly well with the car industry in recent years, but none are in Detroit. The city has developed a very prominent international airport hub - outside city limits. Ford were an early advocate of this approach, and have actually not built a car in Detroit since the Model T factory shut down - surprised me too.

Here's a place less than 30 minutes drive from where your link is, all nice new houses, no decay. But it's not in Detroit. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.39469 ... 384!8i8192

Becomes self-fulfilling after a while. It was exacerbated by a city administration, voted in by those who remain, who just kept piling more and more taxes on the shrinking population (one of the reasons for all those empty land lots is they continued to assess taxes on abandoned structures as long as there was anything still there, although empty).

Here's a surprising one. Surrounded by Detroit city is a notable separate city enclave, of the sort you get around the USA. Hamtramck. Good old traditional US blue collar city area, not Yuppie or urban trendies. But a different political organisation, population about 30,000. Not an empty lot to be seen. It's blindingly obvious when you cross the city boundary
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.39520 ... 384!8i8192
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KeithW
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Re: Ypsilanti - state highway

Post by KeithW »

WHBM wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 00:32 I need to visit "Detroit" from time to time. And this is true. However, for those industries there that remain, they do well - provided they stay outside the city limits. It's an issue in other US cities, but very prominent here. Michigan state has actually done significantly well with the car industry in recent years, but none are in Detroit. The city has developed a very prominent international airport hub - outside city limits. Ford were an early advocate of this approach, and have actually not built a car in Detroit since the Model T factory shut down - surprised me too.

Here's a place less than 30 minutes drive from where your link is, all nice new houses, no decay. But it's not in Detroit. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@42.39469 ... 384!8i8192
Having lived in Ohio I am aware of this. Downtown Columbus almost went the same way but in the 1990's the city tore down the old prison site and some of the slums that had arisen in the short north and managed to turn things round. Personally I lived out at Dublin in a development where there was a sizable Japanese community working at the Honda Marysville Plant.
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