8 ms·

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 realist

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...

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...