10 ms·

After 61 Years, Detroit Gets a Streetcar Once More

michaelflux 9y ago
After having lived in metro Detroit for 16 years prior to moving in 2013, while a part of me thinks it's nice in a "better than nothing" sense, the more realistic part sees this as nothing more than a nice press release which, at the end of the day won't actually do anything for the city. At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport. Combine that with the lack of any sort of a population within walking distance of the Q Line and the line neither going or connecting to anything meaningful, the lack of expansion plans and at the end of the day you just have a shiny train to put in a press release that won't even see enough ridership to even come close to covering it's own cost. Have a look at the cover photo in this article - Woodward is the centre right road in that image. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/exposures-detroit-by-air-alex-maclean.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda... - This is the road along which the Q Line is travelling. I think you can see exactly how much ridership one can reasonably expect.
- ant6n 9y ago
  Your argument is hurt a lot by that statement that it will never cover it's cost. It's not exactly clear what you mean, but in America, transit fares do not cover operating expenses.
- jarboot 9y ago
  The same is happening in Milwaukee. [1] ...and I'm not sure why they're doing stuff like this instead of aiding the ailing north side? We already have buses and could pump money into something much more important. We have much bigger problems than transportation of tourists, shoppers, and whoever is going to spend money at some trendy restaurant. It seems to me that the people spending time to allocate money to this sort of stuff are out of touch on what they should be allocating money towards. But hey, I'm just a lowly citizen with no experience in local politics. [1] http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/ http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/
  - eropple 9y ago
    I know nothing about Milwaukee (some folks would say "you didn't have to add "about Milwaukee"), but there is a tendency for car-owning Americans to eschew buses even in places, like Boston where I live, because buses are "for poor people". It's a messaging problem.
    - thaumasiotes 9y ago
      It's not entirely a messaging problem; long bus trips are a great way to catch diseases from poor people who are traveling sick.
    - bpodgursky 9y ago
      Eh. People in NYC are willing to ride on subways with poor people. For me it's more a matter of never living in a city where buses are both (1) reliable -- the time the schedule says the bus is arriving, is when it arrives, and (2) frequent enough that I don't have to plan my day around the bus schedule. Maybe a place exists where both are true, but I've never seen it.
      - fiblye 9y ago
        I think trains/subways aren't as much of a concern for most people. On a bus, it's not uncommon to end up with a stinky or fairly creepy person stuck next to you with nothing you can do. Trains make it easier to get up and walk away, even moving to another car if you want to.
        afuchs 9y ago
        In New York City, it is illegal to move between subway cars, by using the end doors.
        fiblye 9y ago
        Here in Japan it's perfectly alright, so it varies from place to place. I know the one time I went to New York I saw a guy passing through into other cars, but he didn't seem to be the type to care about the law.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  > At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport. As another person from Detroit, this isn't necessarily true. It's just how Detroit developed after the 1960's riot. The city is based on a wheel and spoke design as opposed to a grid. Detroit was meant to have the downtown area be the commercial and high price residential metropolitan center, with Woodward being the main thoroughfare along which development would spread out. As we both know, many of the high rent areas of the city are on the extreme periphery. (Palmer Woods, Sherwood Forest, etc.) and there is little development on Woodward until you get outside of the city into Ferndale (which starts at the famed 8 Mile Rd) Also, a disproportionate amount of the commerce like big box retailers, movie theaters, shopping malls. is in the outlying suburbs. So the city became inverted, in almost the opposite way the designers intended. But your main point is right, public transportation won't work in the city because of the distribution of population, placement of freeways, etc. Thanks Big Three! Offtopic: Even though Detroit used to be a big city, it feels like a mining town in Appalachia in a way with three instead of one dominant companies, with its fortunes and failures tethered to the boom and bust of the US automotive industry.
- niftich 9y ago
  > Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport This is simply not true. See [1][2][3][4][5] for the evolution of the transit system, from horse-drawn streetcars onward; notice that in the beginning the city's area was much smaller, but as annexations followed, so did transit. Detroit's (current) transit woes are ultimately not that different from those of other American cities: transit needs to go where people work and live, and as both of those have become more distributed, fewer areas are suitable. It's really no surprise that this new development is along the highest-density core; it's also undeniable that this is the area that's experiencing a renaissance and an influx of investment. I'd say that these attributes are inter-related, in that they mutually enable each other. [1] http://detroittransithistory.info/TheEarlyYears.html http://detroittransithistory.info/TheEarlyYears.html [2] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1900.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1900.html [3] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1922.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1922.html [4] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1932.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1932.html [5] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1951.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1951.html
- rmason 9y ago
  Detroit had one of the most successful street car lines of any city in the nation. My father took me to ride on it as a young boy the last week that it was running. People polled were 3 to 1 against it closing. My father was called a crackpot for believing that General Motors was behind the closing and it took fifty years but he was essentially proven correct. The original plan was for the QLine to go out to the edge of the suburbs where it would end at the former State Fairgrounds where Magic Johnson and partners were going to build a shopping center along with apartments and condos. While it would be much more successful if it could connect with the suburbs that doesn't mean it won't be a success. Believe it or not rents in the downtown area have doubled or tripled in the past eight years pricing some of my engineer friends out. The QLine is going to drive development of apartments out Woodward where prices are much lower. The new home for the Red Wings and the Pistons is in Midtown where a large entertainment district is planned along with apartments, easy access to the QLine to go downtown will fill them. Hopefully eventually the city will convince the feds and the state to extend the QLine out to at least eight mile. The city also imho badly needs a second line running from the airport to the downtown hotels.
  - csours 9y ago
    Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. GM was definitely involved in shutting down streetcars[W], but it's not entirely correct to say that GM was the cause of shutting down streetcars. In addition to whatever GM did, look at the expansion of cities in this time period (1920s to 1950s). Paved streets could be added much more quickly than streetcar lines[0]. The automobile was there to use them by this time. Buses can also use paved streets. Paved streets have a much larger network effect than streetcar lines due to the time and cost to add the streetcar rails. (Think switched network vs old AT&T system) Faced with the growth of paved streets and the cost of operating parallel transit systems (bus and streetcar lines), many operators stopped operating streetcars - you can replace streetcars with buses, but you can't replace buses with streetcars. --- [0] There's a parallel debate to be had here about density, but at the time it was much easier and cost effective[1] to grow the suburbs than the city center. A huge amount of american purchasing power was unlocked because people could afford to buy their own reasonably priced homes in the suburbs[1]. 1. Again, plenty of room for debate on this. [W] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
mbfg 9y ago
Curious as to why these are better than buses? Are they that much more energy efficient or something to account for the high cost of installation?
- anovikov 9y ago
  They don't stand in traffic. Tram lines are built in a way they have a physical priority on the road. They can also take a lot more people than a bus. Streetcars are good for you :), it is funny to see how people are viewing them as a novelty. Down here in Europe, after some degradation (but not outright removal as in the U.S.) in 1970-1980s, tram lines are being built like crazy. East European countries especially benefit since they didn't see much tram degradation - time when a personal car was in vogue in the 70s-80s was Soviet times for them, so they didn't have cars, and by 1989 cities have realized that scrapping public transport in a city is impossible.
- ferongr 9y ago
  These are not old-timey tourist-trap "streetcars" wobbling around at 15mph. Modern "trams" are fast, quite, provide better ammenities for wheelchairs and strollers and provide greater travel comfort. Like rolling stock in general, they're built to higher standards compared to buses and will last a lot longer with way smaller maintanace cost. They also use a lot less energy per passenger-mile to move due to the minimal friction of steel wheels on rails compared to rubber wheel.
- signalling 9y ago
  The flexibility and lower cost of buses is actually a profound disadvantage from an economic signalling perspective. I'd argue the most important reason why tram or rail line is better than a bus is the sunk cost of installation, which prevents rerouting and discourages withdrawal of service. This encourages private investment along the service corridor because the route is not subject to political whims. In other words, it can be relied upon for time scales on the order of decades, and that matters in real estate. (Also they're generally much more pleasant to ride than buses, but I don't want to overemphasize aesthetics. The real reason people prefer trains over buses is reliability.)
- 9y ago
vorg 9y ago
Had to laugh when I saw the overhead wires in the pic of the streetcar. It you click on the "related stories" link titled "In D.C. And China, Two Approaches To A Streetcar Unconstrained By Wires", you can read about Guangzhou's wireless tram: "You can see that as the train enters the station, it just lightly touches those contact strips, and in 20 seconds it's fully charged and ready to go to the next station".
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Seattle has a very over-complicated overhead system so the trams can share streets with electric trolly buses. It took took a lot of additional time to deploy due to that. Wellington decided to ditch electric trolly buses (and ignored recommendations by residents to re-implement an airport/golden-mile tram, sadly). The battery tech in non-overheard wire based trams is still pretty expensive and high maintenance. I really don't think it's worth the price. Rail take years to setup, and despite it being amazing and necessary, it's also political suicide in America's "We hate public transport because <insert reason here>" America is decades behinds the world in real public transport; including mid/high income countries that are way less densely populated.
  - csours 9y ago
    I visited Seattle recently and wondered what was up with that. That and the monorail... As it is, I mostly walked everywhere, including from the Space Needle over to Safeco Field.
    - 35bge57dtjku 9y ago
      To be fair that monorail was built a really long time ago. And are any of those things really better than the existing buses?
      - gotthemwmds 9y ago
        For some commutes, particularly to Capitol Hill and the University District, or into South Seattle or the airport, Link Light Rail is much better than the buses, largely due to it being entirely separated from street traffic for its entire line.
iso-8859-1 9y ago
More info on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine Note that all rides are free this weekend!
jpatokal 9y ago
One thing that's particularly absurd about this line: the headway (average time between trains) is 20 minutes, and they don't even publish the schedule! Meanwhile, the existing bus service along the same road will continue to operate at 6-8 minute intervals...
WalterBright 9y ago
I spent a week in Berlin recently, and it shows how a comprehensive mass transit system ought to work. There are subways, trains, streetcars, and buses all linked together. It's a marvelous system. You can get anywhere in the metropolitan area quickly. There's no need to have a car at all.
- pimeys 9y ago
  Adding to that, it's completely marvelous to cycle in here. Even when riding amongst cars it always feels like you are just one of the vehicles and others respect your position in the traffic. And there are almost no hills...
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Seattle keeps trying to turn itself into a bikeable city, but the hills make it a trial for anyone not training for the Tour de France. To further make the point, in Europe, people bicycle in street clothes. In Seattle, it's hard to find a biker who isn't wearing a Tour de France racing outfit.
    - corybrown 9y ago
      Seems like that in every US city. Biking is almost a lifestyle with special clothes and gear.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- type0 9y ago
  I wasn't that impressed with Berlins transportation, Prague on the other hand has one of the most enchanting public transport systems (as is the whole city).
kainolophobia 9y ago
I rode this last night. It has a flaw that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. In the midtown area, the streetcar tracks are in the outermost lanes of the 6-lane street. This causes a problem at intersections because the Qline can easily be blocked by cars that are trying to turn right off of Woodward (the main road). The problem gets worse when you consider that this rail line was built to incentivize more people to come downtown. More foot traffic will inevitably block more cars at crosswalks, which in turn slows down the streetcar. I'm assuming they can attempt to fix this by limiting the number of legal right hand turns or fix the lights to stay green until the streetcar passes through, but I'm not sure there will ever be enough pressure to do so.

After having lived in metro Detroit for 16 years prior to moving in 2013, while a part of me thinks it's nice in a "better than nothing" sense, the more realistic part sees this as nothing more than a nice press release which, at the end of the day won't actually do anything for the city. At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport. Combine that with the lack of any sort of a population within walking distance of the Q Line and the line neither going or connecting to anything meaningful, the lack of expansion plans and at the end of the day you just have a shiny train to put in a press release that won't even see enough ridership to even come close to covering it's own cost. Have a look at the cover photo in this article - Woodward is the centre right road in that image. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/exposures-detroit-by-air-alex-maclean.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda... - This is the road along which the Q Line is travelling. I think you can see exactly how much ridership one can reasonably expect.

ant6n 9y ago
Your argument is hurt a lot by that statement that it will never cover it's cost. It's not exactly clear what you mean, but in America, transit fares do not cover operating expenses.
jarboot 9y ago
The same is happening in Milwaukee. [1] ...and I'm not sure why they're doing stuff like this instead of aiding the ailing north side? We already have buses and could pump money into something much more important. We have much bigger problems than transportation of tourists, shoppers, and whoever is going to spend money at some trendy restaurant. It seems to me that the people spending time to allocate money to this sort of stuff are out of touch on what they should be allocating money towards. But hey, I'm just a lowly citizen with no experience in local politics. [1] http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/ http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/
- eropple 9y ago
  I know nothing about Milwaukee (some folks would say "you didn't have to add "about Milwaukee"), but there is a tendency for car-owning Americans to eschew buses even in places, like Boston where I live, because buses are "for poor people". It's a messaging problem.
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    It's not entirely a messaging problem; long bus trips are a great way to catch diseases from poor people who are traveling sick.
  - bpodgursky 9y ago
    Eh. People in NYC are willing to ride on subways with poor people. For me it's more a matter of never living in a city where buses are both (1) reliable -- the time the schedule says the bus is arriving, is when it arrives, and (2) frequent enough that I don't have to plan my day around the bus schedule. Maybe a place exists where both are true, but I've never seen it.
    - fiblye 9y ago
      I think trains/subways aren't as much of a concern for most people. On a bus, it's not uncommon to end up with a stinky or fairly creepy person stuck next to you with nothing you can do. Trains make it easier to get up and walk away, even moving to another car if you want to.
      - afuchs 9y ago
        In New York City, it is illegal to move between subway cars, by using the end doors.
        fiblye 9y ago
        Here in Japan it's perfectly alright, so it varies from place to place. I know the one time I went to New York I saw a guy passing through into other cars, but he didn't seem to be the type to care about the law.
FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
> At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport. As another person from Detroit, this isn't necessarily true. It's just how Detroit developed after the 1960's riot. The city is based on a wheel and spoke design as opposed to a grid. Detroit was meant to have the downtown area be the commercial and high price residential metropolitan center, with Woodward being the main thoroughfare along which development would spread out. As we both know, many of the high rent areas of the city are on the extreme periphery. (Palmer Woods, Sherwood Forest, etc.) and there is little development on Woodward until you get outside of the city into Ferndale (which starts at the famed 8 Mile Rd) Also, a disproportionate amount of the commerce like big box retailers, movie theaters, shopping malls. is in the outlying suburbs. So the city became inverted, in almost the opposite way the designers intended. But your main point is right, public transportation won't work in the city because of the distribution of population, placement of freeways, etc. Thanks Big Three! Offtopic: Even though Detroit used to be a big city, it feels like a mining town in Appalachia in a way with three instead of one dominant companies, with its fortunes and failures tethered to the boom and bust of the US automotive industry.
niftich 9y ago
> Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up to discourage public transport This is simply not true. See [1][2][3][4][5] for the evolution of the transit system, from horse-drawn streetcars onward; notice that in the beginning the city's area was much smaller, but as annexations followed, so did transit. Detroit's (current) transit woes are ultimately not that different from those of other American cities: transit needs to go where people work and live, and as both of those have become more distributed, fewer areas are suitable. It's really no surprise that this new development is along the highest-density core; it's also undeniable that this is the area that's experiencing a renaissance and an influx of investment. I'd say that these attributes are inter-related, in that they mutually enable each other. [1] http://detroittransithistory.info/TheEarlyYears.html http://detroittransithistory.info/TheEarlyYears.html [2] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1900.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1900.html [3] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1922.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1922.html [4] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1932.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1932.html [5] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1951.html https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1951.html
rmason 9y ago
Detroit had one of the most successful street car lines of any city in the nation. My father took me to ride on it as a young boy the last week that it was running. People polled were 3 to 1 against it closing. My father was called a crackpot for believing that General Motors was behind the closing and it took fifty years but he was essentially proven correct. The original plan was for the QLine to go out to the edge of the suburbs where it would end at the former State Fairgrounds where Magic Johnson and partners were going to build a shopping center along with apartments and condos. While it would be much more successful if it could connect with the suburbs that doesn't mean it won't be a success. Believe it or not rents in the downtown area have doubled or tripled in the past eight years pricing some of my engineer friends out. The QLine is going to drive development of apartments out Woodward where prices are much lower. The new home for the Red Wings and the Pistons is in Midtown where a large entertainment district is planned along with apartments, easy access to the QLine to go downtown will fill them. Hopefully eventually the city will convince the feds and the state to extend the QLine out to at least eight mile. The city also imho badly needs a second line running from the airport to the downtown hotels.
- csours 9y ago
  Disclaimer up front: I work for GM. GM was definitely involved in shutting down streetcars[W], but it's not entirely correct to say that GM was the cause of shutting down streetcars. In addition to whatever GM did, look at the expansion of cities in this time period (1920s to 1950s). Paved streets could be added much more quickly than streetcar lines[0]. The automobile was there to use them by this time. Buses can also use paved streets. Paved streets have a much larger network effect than streetcar lines due to the time and cost to add the streetcar rails. (Think switched network vs old AT&T system) Faced with the growth of paved streets and the cost of operating parallel transit systems (bus and streetcar lines), many operators stopped operating streetcars - you can replace streetcars with buses, but you can't replace buses with streetcars. --- [0] There's a parallel debate to be had here about density, but at the time it was much easier and cost effective[1] to grow the suburbs than the city center. A huge amount of american purchasing power was unlocked because people could afford to buy their own reasonably priced homes in the suburbs[1]. 1. Again, plenty of room for debate on this. [W] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

mbfg 9y ago

Curious as to why these are better than buses? Are they that much more energy efficient or something to account for the high cost of installation?

anovikov 9y ago
They don't stand in traffic. Tram lines are built in a way they have a physical priority on the road. They can also take a lot more people than a bus. Streetcars are good for you :), it is funny to see how people are viewing them as a novelty. Down here in Europe, after some degradation (but not outright removal as in the U.S.) in 1970-1980s, tram lines are being built like crazy. East European countries especially benefit since they didn't see much tram degradation - time when a personal car was in vogue in the 70s-80s was Soviet times for them, so they didn't have cars, and by 1989 cities have realized that scrapping public transport in a city is impossible.
ferongr 9y ago
These are not old-timey tourist-trap "streetcars" wobbling around at 15mph. Modern "trams" are fast, quite, provide better ammenities for wheelchairs and strollers and provide greater travel comfort. Like rolling stock in general, they're built to higher standards compared to buses and will last a lot longer with way smaller maintanace cost. They also use a lot less energy per passenger-mile to move due to the minimal friction of steel wheels on rails compared to rubber wheel.
signalling 9y ago
The flexibility and lower cost of buses is actually a profound disadvantage from an economic signalling perspective. I'd argue the most important reason why tram or rail line is better than a bus is the sunk cost of installation, which prevents rerouting and discourages withdrawal of service. This encourages private investment along the service corridor because the route is not subject to political whims. In other words, it can be relied upon for time scales on the order of decades, and that matters in real estate. (Also they're generally much more pleasant to ride than buses, but I don't want to overemphasize aesthetics. The real reason people prefer trains over buses is reliability.)
9y ago

vorg 9y ago

Had to laugh when I saw the overhead wires in the pic of the streetcar. It you click on the "related stories" link titled "In D.C. And China, Two Approaches To A Streetcar Unconstrained By Wires", you can read about Guangzhou's wireless tram: "You can see that as the train enters the station, it just lightly touches those contact strips, and in 20 seconds it's fully charged and ready to go to the next station".

djsumdog 9y ago
Seattle has a very over-complicated overhead system so the trams can share streets with electric trolly buses. It took took a lot of additional time to deploy due to that. Wellington decided to ditch electric trolly buses (and ignored recommendations by residents to re-implement an airport/golden-mile tram, sadly). The battery tech in non-overheard wire based trams is still pretty expensive and high maintenance. I really don't think it's worth the price. Rail take years to setup, and despite it being amazing and necessary, it's also political suicide in America's "We hate public transport because <insert reason here>" America is decades behinds the world in real public transport; including mid/high income countries that are way less densely populated.
- csours 9y ago
  I visited Seattle recently and wondered what was up with that. That and the monorail... As it is, I mostly walked everywhere, including from the Space Needle over to Safeco Field.
  - 35bge57dtjku 9y ago
    To be fair that monorail was built a really long time ago. And are any of those things really better than the existing buses?
    - gotthemwmds 9y ago
      For some commutes, particularly to Capitol Hill and the University District, or into South Seattle or the airport, Link Light Rail is much better than the buses, largely due to it being entirely separated from street traffic for its entire line.

iso-8859-1 9y ago

More info on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine Note that all rides are free this weekend!

jpatokal 9y ago

One thing that's particularly absurd about this line: the headway (average time between trains) is 20 minutes, and they don't even publish the schedule! Meanwhile, the existing bus service along the same road will continue to operate at 6-8 minute intervals...

WalterBright 9y ago

I spent a week in Berlin recently, and it shows how a comprehensive mass transit system ought to work. There are subways, trains, streetcars, and buses all linked together. It's a marvelous system. You can get anywhere in the metropolitan area quickly. There's no need to have a car at all.

pimeys 9y ago
Adding to that, it's completely marvelous to cycle in here. Even when riding amongst cars it always feels like you are just one of the vehicles and others respect your position in the traffic. And there are almost no hills...
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Seattle keeps trying to turn itself into a bikeable city, but the hills make it a trial for anyone not training for the Tour de France. To further make the point, in Europe, people bicycle in street clothes. In Seattle, it's hard to find a biker who isn't wearing a Tour de France racing outfit.
  - corybrown 9y ago
    Seems like that in every US city. Biking is almost a lifestyle with special clothes and gear.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
type0 9y ago
I wasn't that impressed with Berlins transportation, Prague on the other hand has one of the most enchanting public transport systems (as is the whole city).

kainolophobia 9y ago

I rode this last night. It has a flaw that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere. In the midtown area, the streetcar tracks are in the outermost lanes of the 6-lane street. This causes a problem at intersections because the Qline can easily be blocked by cars that are trying to turn right off of Woodward (the main road). The problem gets worse when you consider that this rail line was built to incentivize more people to come downtown. More foot traffic will inevitably block more cars at crosswalks, which in turn slows down the streetcar. I'm assuming they can attempt to fix this by limiting the number of legal right hand turns or fix the lights to stay green until the streetcar passes through, but I'm not sure there will ever be enough pressure to do so.