Big Dreams, but Little Consensus, for a New Detroit

But reinventing a city so devastated is hardly a sure thing, and the questions about how to proceed loom as large as the answers:

Should its areas of nearly vacant blocks be transformed into urban farms, parks and even ponds made from storm water?

Could its old automobile manufacturing economy be shifted into one centering on technology, bioscience and international trade?

Should Detroit, which lost a million residents over the last 60 years, pin its sharpest hopes on luring more young people here, playing on an influx of artists and entrepreneurs?

Should the city take down its enormous ruins, like Michigan Central Station, that have devolved into bleak tourist attractions or restore some of these buildings and market them, perhaps as museums or tributes to a proud industrial past?

“Every once in a while you encounter a situation that gets so bad everybody has to put their weapons aside and say: ‘You know what? It doesn’t get any worse than this,’ ” said Henry Cisneros, a former Housing and Urban Development secretary who recently worked on a housing project here that never came to fruition. “It lets people start talking about things that we couldn’t talk about before because we can’t lose a great city.”

The chances of a true makeover have grown significantly since July, when an emergency manager assigned by the state to oversee the city’s finances sought bankruptcy protection. The city is expected to emerge from the courts a year from now no longer juggling the $18 billion in debt that had sidetracked it and, according to the emergency manager, more capably providing essential services that make a city livable, like stopping crime and putting out fires. All of that, planners said, should make a larger transformation, outside the court system, conceivable.

Some have long been searching for solutions to the hollowing out of Detroit, a city that measures six times the land mass of Manhattan but is now home to only 700,000 people, down from 1.8 million at its peak. Individuals have often pressed forward with their own answers: The city should be perceived as a hub for fish farms or techno music or public art displays or film (an announcement last month that a Superman-Batman movie starring Ben Affleck would film around Detroit drew headlines here).

As recently as January, Detroit leaders rolled out an elaborate plan known as “Detroit Future City” that ran 347 pages and called, in part, for building up thriving neighborhoods and turning other land into parks, landscapes, storm-water runoff areas or even commercial sections in the neighborhoods that have all but emptied. Authors said the plan — written over the past three years even as the city’s financial crisis loomed — included guidance from thousands of residents, and a wide range of leaders here say they have begun to view it as a guide. And the Kresge Foundation, which was founded in Detroit in 1924, has pledged $150 million to support the goals laid out in the plan.

Urban planners and political leaders liken the scope of changes being pondered for Detroit to some European cities after World War II. Rip Rapson, president and chief executive of the Kresge Foundation, called it a “rebirthing” of Detroit, and Toni L. Griffin, an urban planner based in New York who has been a leading consultant on Detroit’s long-range plan, portrayed it as a “super-restructuring” to improve the quality of life.

“After a tragedy is one of the few times you can be trying to reimagine a city rather than just trying to go back to what you were before,” said Scott Cowen, the president of Tulane University, who is writing a book examining the remaking of New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. “What you really need is transformational change, not just incremental change to get back to where you were,” he said in an interview. “That’s been very important to resurgence of this city, and Detroit has to do the same thing.”

Some Detroiters see urban farming as an elegant solution to several of the city’s woes — an abundance of land but not of people; a shortage of jobs; and, according to some, a dearth of fresh food. Plenty of farms, some tiny and others not, already are thriving, though critics question how sizable a dent such notions can ever make to solve the city’s larger economic challenges.

“The promise that Detroit, one way or another, is going to restart so it’s actually functional is a really big step in this,” said Mike Score, president of a company that wants within two years to plant at least 15,000 trees as part of a farm in a section of the city’s East Side that is troubled by vacant buildings and empty lots.

No single economic answer will be enough for Detroit, say experts like Donald K. Carter, of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. “Another silver bullet will just be a silver bullet that runs out in 20 years,” Mr. Carter said.

Instead, leaders have their hopes set on a range of fields, many of which have already found some success here. They have pushed for new medical and science-related businesses near the city’s universities and new technology companies and start-ups in the city’s downtown. And some are pondering prospects for expanding international trade, given plans for a new bridge to Canada.

In Bloomberg’s City of Bike Lanes, Data Show, Cabs Gain a Little Speed

But according to the New York City Transportation Department, a lengthy campaign to reallocate street space for cyclists and pedestrians has produced a curious result: If anything, officials said, cars are moving more quickly in the city’s most congested areas.

Citing GPS data from the city’s yellow cabs, the Bloomberg administration said that average traffic speeds in Manhattan’s primary central business district, south of 60th Street, had increased nearly 7 percent since 2008.

And it is not as though the streets have become less congested: traffic volume has remained relatively level in recent years, as transit ridership and bike commuting have increased. In 2008, about 756,000 cars entered Manhattan south of 60th Street each day, transportation officials said. In 2011, the most recent year for which full data is available, the figure was 764,000.

“We’re not, despite our reputation, trying to take from one and give to the other,” Bruce Schaller, the department’s deputy commissioner for traffic and planning, said. “It isn’t a zero-sum game.”

The most recent speed data, part of an annual report known as the Sustainable Streets Index, was calculated using taxi trip logs, drawing on the distance and duration of a trip, including time spent stopped in traffic or at lights. The report also includes a section on taxi driver behavior in the rain — cabbies, happily, were found to drive 11.9 percent slower on days with at least an inch of precipitation — and an appraisal of the city’s bike-share program, which has attracted more than 75,000 annual members.

As it has in the past, the study also examined how the calendar might affect traffic speeds in Manhattan. January, February, March and August were the fastest months; May, June, July and December were the slowest, with one caveat: The fastest average speed, 14.8 miles per hour, was recorded on Christmas Day. The analysis excluded days during and immediately after Hurricane Sandy.

The city has observed speed fluctuations in past years, officials said, but a flagging economy, service cuts on subways and buses, and increases in transit fares had made it difficult to tease out long-term trends.

Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, said that with more comprehensive post-recession data now available, the department could say with confidence that traffic speeds had at least remained stable after the introduction of pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes. (If 2009 is used as a comparison instead of 2008, traffic speeds have increased 0.3 percent as traffic volumes remained roughly flat.)

Critics of the Transportation Department, including some local officials, have in the past accused the city of selectively using data to bolster its claims about improving the streets. And among drivers, the department’s most recent conclusions were met with nearly universal distrust.

“They cut the streets in half to have people sit,” said Abdullah Muhammed, a general contractor, sitting in his truck near 49th Street and Broadway on Tuesday.

Asked if this had made navigating Midtown more difficult, Mr. Muhammed gave a lengthy smirk, then nodded toward a clogged portion of Broadway.

Christopher McBride, a transportation specialist with AAA New York, noted that while traffic volumes had been fairly consistent in recent years, they had decreased significantly compared with 10 to 15 years ago, suggesting that some commuters had simply given up on Midtown driving in the Bloomberg years.

“It is more of a hassle now than ever to drive into the central business district,” he said. “Some of these changes that have occurred, they’re more intimidating for drivers. And a lot of parking has been eliminated.”

He added improvements in the city’s traffic signal system had offset the “negative traffic speed impacts of pedestrian plazas and bike lanes,” allowing speeds to at least remain steady.

The city’s report does not discuss how certain projects, like the closing of several blocks along Broadway, have affected speeds in their immediate surroundings, though a 2010 study found that travel speeds near the plaza had improved. A separate report released that year from New York City Transit suggested that the plazas of Times and Herald Squares had slowed some buses as traffic was rerouted onto Seventh Avenue.

But Mr. Schaller argued that additions like protected bike lanes were not especially disruptive to drivers. “When we put in a bike lane, you think, ‘Oh, you’re taking a lane,’ ” Mr. Schaller said. “But that left curb was always taken by the left-turning cars anyway. And the through traffic has the same number of lanes that it did before.”

In his final years in office, Mr. Bloomberg has at times taken great pains to slow down the city’s drivers. He pushed for a measure, recently enacted, to install speed-tracking cameras near some city schools, and has introduced designated “slow zones” where the speed limit is reduced to 20 miles per hour, from 30 m.p.h.

But drivers in much of Manhattan can rarely flout the law, even if they try. The average taxi speed south of 60th Street was 9.3 miles per hour, the report said, leaving passengers behind the pace of a well-trained runner.