The following is adapted from a presentation Lorna made at a "Walkways and Wideways" conference in March.

I believe in the power of ONE-ONE person, ONE organization, ONE coalition.

The story of the effort to stop the diagonal of Northwestern Highway at its present terminus at Orchard Lake Road and 14 Mile Road is most certainly the story of the power of one.

When I first joined a fledgling group of West Bloomfield residents in 1973 that soon became Concerned Citizens for West Bloomfield, our first president, Ruth O'Gawa, gave me a motto on a piece of cardboard, which I have carefully squirreled away where I could find it at appropriate times. It said:

"Press on-Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not. The world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent."

I must admit that in the fight to stop Northwestern, with ten organizations and hundreds of dedicated people involved, we had plenty of talent, genius and education. But it was the persistence and determination that added the most successful ingredient.

The road had been put on the map in 1926 as a broken line, stretching from Detroit to the northwest. In 1929, it was declared a "benefit" road, dead-ending in the West Bloomfield farmland. By 1973, it was a four-lane, free-access highway spewing out thousands of cars in evening rush hour onto two over-worked, under-cared-for roads at that same dead end. (Average daily traffic then was more than 18,600.)

Local land developers had formed the Northwest Action Group (NAG) to force the construction of the road. The Detroit Free Press did a three-page expose of the pressure being exerted by NAG, with local officials, to say the least, supportive.

Then Janet Lynn, chair of the Citizens Council for Land Use Education and Research, wrote to ask Governor William Milliken for a full-scale environmental impact statement before that shovel could turn over the ground. This stopped the momentum and gave time for us to organize our opposition.

This was a time when quality of life meant nothing as an argument. Sprawl was called growth. And the word was, you couldn't fight city hall.

Well then, why did we all think we could do something about stopping this road? Let's go back to how we started out on the "road" to action.

In the previous year, developer Albert Taubman had been working with the West Bloomfield Township Planning Commission to approve building what is now the Twelve Oaks Mall at the northwest corner of Maple and Halstead Roads. Residents had got wind of this and turned out in record numbers at two West Bloomfield Planning Commission meetings. The presence of some 600 to 800 residents at the meeting at which the rezoning was to be approved rather forcefully suggested to the Commission that this was a bad idea. They turned the request down, and the Mall went to Novi, welcomed with open arms.

A group of people who led the resident insurrection against the Mall rezoning got to wondering why that Mall was planned for this desolate corner of nowhere. And EUREKA! A look at the map and it was evident. This was to be an exit of the planned extension of Northwestern Highway. Originally, it had been planned to go diagonally through West Bloomfield and on up to Fenton, but when the Michigan State Transportation Commission decided to build I-275, its terminus was changed to the area of Pontiac Trail and Haggerty. Flushed with success fighting the Mall, our organizations decided to stop what was going to bring the Mall here.

For West Bloomfield it would have meant cutting off the southwest corner of the township from the rest, devastating lakes and wetlands, enticing traffic through the township that would not have come otherwise. It also would have meant noise, pollution and over-commercialization along the route.

Concerned Citizens for West Bloomfield incorporated and joined a loose 10-member "Northwestern Coalition" led by East Michigan Environmental Action Council's astute attorney, George Snyder, as chair. For the next several years, representatives of our organizations met regularly. We:

Collected more than 5,000 signatures against the highway and took them to the State Transportation Commission in Lansing.
Produced newsletters for our members and publicity for local media.
Intervened in a lawsuit brought by the Oakland County Road Commission against the State Transportation Commission to force construction of the Highway.
Regularly attended State Transportation Commission meetings in Lansing and kept in touch with members of the Commission who appeared to be on our side.

Eventually, we made so much noise and persisted so conscientiously that the State Transportation Commission formed a Citizen Advisory Council (CAC) to Northwestern Highway made up of one representative from each of our organizations which met monthly under the chairmanship of Walker Cisler.

Recommendations were about to be made when (at our request and insistence, joined by a Commerce Township group, Citizens in Opposition to 275 under Steven Rossman) the I-275 project was cancelled. (The ghost of this one came back later as the Haggerty Connector.)

Essentially, Northwestern as a diagonal was dead at this point (about 1978), although it went out with a whimper rather than a bang. The sad thing was that West Bloomfield Township refused to take the road off the master plan, and much of the intense zoning that now exists along its former route was dictated by the ghost of the road (Chimney Hill, Thornberry, Aldingbrook, subdivisions).

We hope that by stopping this one road, we have impeded the sprawl process somewhat. Certainly, we have had a very positive effect on preserving the environmental features and community quality. We do know this: the secret of citizen success lies in the growing and continuing strength of our citizen organizations and their will to persist.