A quarter century ago, many people thought revitalizing Detroit meant rebuilding the city along suburban lines.

Developers built new shopping centers in the '80s and early '90s on Woodward and East Jefferson that resembled suburban strip malls. Rows of storefronts were set far back from the street behind acres of parking. And that was just one "suburbanization" tactic.

New riverfront residential projects became gated communities rather than traditional city neighborhoods. Shopping still meant getting in a car and driving to the suburbs.

Planners and developers working in Detroit today favor a much different model. It goes by various names, from walkable urbanism to 20-minute neighborhoods. At its heart is the idea we need to re-create neighborhoods where people want to live and work, with easy access to shops and services and parks and transportation options.

Within this concept, nothing has generated more debate than the new bicycle lanes showing up around the city.

Pro and con

In a few short years, the City of Detroit has expanded its network of bicycle lanes on city streets from a few dozen miles to many times that number. The latest installations, along Cass through Midtown and on East Jefferson Avenue from downtown to the Grosse Pointe line, are "protected," meaning physically separated from motor vehicle traffic by barriers.

These new protected bike lanes have sparked no end of grumbling. Many of the howls of protest come from commuters from the suburbs who complain that their morning and evening drive is being inconvenienced.

Others protest that residents weren't given a voice in the decision to build bike lanes, even though the city held multiple public meetings over several years on the plan.

I take the other side. The new bike lanes fit squarely into the city's vision of revitalized traditional neighborhoods and a broad range of transportation options for residents.

The real question is: What is the city designed for? Is it designed to move vehicles along streets at a high rate of speed? Or is it designed for engagement, for people to interact with each other socially and commercially in the neighborhoods and along our commercial corridors?

If you accept that it's the latter — as officials including Detroit planning director Maurice Cox have been preaching — then creating opportunities for social engagement, with wider sidewalks and slower traffic and closing some streets — such as creating Spirit Plaza by closing Woodward for a block north of Jefferson — is the way to go.

Protected bike lanes are part of that vision. They encourage families, young people, women and seniors to engage much more actively than unprotected bike lanes or no bike lanes at all.

More than 'bike lanes'

The term "bike lanes" itself is somewhat misleading. Seniors riding their motorized wheelchair-type scooters use the bike lanes now rather than riding in traffic as they did before. Riders on the new Bird and Lime scooters often use the bike lanes, too.

And certainly narrowing the traffic lanes to create bike lanes has had the spin-off benefit of making it easier and safer for pedestrians to cross our widest streets.

Pedestrian dangers:

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Detroit pedestrians face high risks

Protected bike lanes, in short, are just one part of a broad new conception of how we rebuild Detroit. If you like neighborhood retail, where residents can walk to shops and services, and if you believe a city ought to offer a full range of mobility options, you'll support the new bike lanes.

Debunking the protesters

The main objections to the new bike lanes seem pretty flimsy to me. To cite a few:

"My commute is slower"

It may in fact take a little longer to get in and out of downtown Detroit these days. But it's not because of bike lanes. Since the downtown revival began, about 20,000 more people work downtown today than in 2010. And almost all of them drive their cars into the central business district.

That huge volume of new traffic at rush hour explains why commutes are slower. It underscores why parking rates have soared downtown and why traffic is so snarled during events.

Chade Saghir, an analyst who keeps track of transportation data for the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments, said traffic volumes have increased throughout the region in the past few years as the economy picked up and gas prices declined. More cars and trucks on the road translates into slower commute times.

"Nobody uses the bike lanes"

I've heard this one a lot, and it makes no sense. We often don't see our sidewalks filled with pedestrians at all hours. But nobody suggests we do away with sidewalks, do they?

Bikers may still be getting used to riding on Jefferson and Cass. But in the meantime, the Detroit Greenways Coalition, a nonprofit that lobbies for safe, protected trails and bike lanes, notes that there are several dozen bicycle clubs operating in the city. The popular Slow Roll weekly bike ride sometimes sees more than 1,000 riders.

And the city's MoGo bike sharing program reached 100,000 rented bike trips less than five months after its launch in 2017.

So clearly somebody is using the new bike lanes, even if greater usage will depend upon further build-out of the city's entire planned network of trails and bike lanes.

"Bikers don't pay road taxes like motorists do"

But of course they do. Most bikers also drive a motor vehicle, and they pay the same gas taxes that everyone else does. And don't forget that much of our road funding comes from general tax revenue, which everyone pays, not just from fuel taxes.

As Todd Scott, director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition, wrote in an opinion piece earlier this year, "The cost of bicycle and pedestrian facilities are just a fraction of the transportation costs in this state. If anything, bicyclists and pedestrians subsidize motorists."

"Bikers don't follow the rules"

Neither do many motorists, who treat the 35 mph speed limit on East Jefferson as a joke.

As a longtime resident, I certainly have more complaints about motorists going too fast on city streets, weaving in and out of traffic lanes, talking on phones or texting while driving, than I do about bicyclists using the new bike lanes.

What's ahead?

Could the city have designed the bike lanes better? Yes, and that will happen over time as refinements are made.

Could the roll-out of the bike lanes have been done better? Perhaps, just as the introduction of Bird and Lime scooters could have been done better.

But the remodeling of city streets and neighborhoods will continue, and rightly so. We're no longer trying to suburbanize the city and give priority to vehicle traffic. Today's planners are designing a city for today and tomorrow in ways more productive than in the past.

Also on Freep.com:

Detroit neighborhoods need help. Here's the issue

Eatery shows challenge of neighborhood revival

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.