After 61 Years, Detroit Gets a Streetcar Once More
npr.org
npr.org
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/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.
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.
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_consp...
Apologists will say the street cars were doomed both by cars and the popularity of buses. In fact a CBS report stated exactly that.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gm-trolley-conspiracy-what-r...
Detroit's street car line however was profitable and wildly popular with the city's citizens. Less than two years later with its new secret owner it was reporting losses and was shut down.
Why would GM hide the fact it was buying the street car lines with a shadow corporation. Why would GM deny that it was the real owner of National City Corporation for over fifty years? That Wikipedia article reads like it was written by the GM publicity department. Why after all these years doesn't the company simply fess up that they did something wrong?
Streetcars tracks can be put on the ... street. The hint is in the name, kind of. :) . They're also much lighter than railroad or metro tracks. You can have level crossings and tight corners.
I don't see them as especially hard to build. Cars probably require a lot more space, when you add all the multiple lanes, intersections, overpasses etc, when you take into account their low density.
So I wouldn't see it as obviously going either way.
The core problem is a single lane of dedicated public transit can move more than 10x as many people as a single lane of roads. In minimal traffic areas you can mix busses and cars, but as soon as roads reach there minimal limits near a city you need to segregate traffic.
PS: Cars do with in low density areas and Extreme levels of congestion pricing are one way around this. If it costs 50$ / day to park in the city you get less traffic, but passing such regulations are incredibly difficult.
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 [2] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1900.html [3] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1922.html [4] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1932.html [5] https://www.chicagorailfan.com/dsrt1951.html
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.
...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.
If the trendy restaurant people hop on first people from all walks of life will want to follow. But if you start with the needy that will stay your brand forever. Most bus systems are locked in that trap.
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.
And there are almost no hills...
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.
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".
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/2015/06/08/rail-bu...
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.
As it is, I mostly walked everywhere, including from the Space Needle over to Safeco Field.
http://seattlemonorail.org/smp/greenmap.html
Seattle turned down the federal money that would eventually become Atlanta's MARTA system.
* The first in 1997 basically blessed the project and created the corporate entity to build it, got 53% of the vote.
* A second in 2000 approved public funds to plan it and passed with 56%.
* A third in 2002 approved a motor vehicle excise tax to fund it, and was more controversial (since real money was at stake) and only squeaked through with 50.2% of the vote.
* A fourth initiative in 2004 was intended to kill the project by directing the city to deny air rights above public streets to the project, and was thumped with 64% voting no.
* It was the fifth initiative in 2005 that killed the project, demanded by the city after a disastrous financing plan was announced (The excise tax approved in the 2002 referendum did not deliver the expected revenue, and a ridiculous financing scheme was proposed to cover the shortfall that would result in $9 billion in interest being paid on $2 billion in construction.) And on top of that, the line was significantly shortened, dropping desperately needed service to Ballard.
The fate of this project is more an object lesson in what it takes to actually accomplish a project with popular support in the face of sustained opposition. The whole project was hated from the get-go by some big money in town who had de-facto control over the city council and the mayoralty. That's why there were so many ballot initiatives - the city government was dragged kicking and screaming by the public, through votes to build the damn thing, in the face of well-financed campaigns against the enabling referendums.
In the end, it took self-inflicted injury by the project staff (bad financing plan on top of a scaled-back green line) to get the public to pull the plug. I don't think it's fair to pin the failure of this particular project on "hating public transport for silly reasons."
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.
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.)
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.
Personally, I prefer the tram to the (Diesel) bus, since it's less shaky, less noisy, wider, longer and brighter. It's really a much nicer way to travel. Trams also tend to get their own signals and/or lanes a lot more than buses seem to, but that's of course not an inherent feature.
Light rail tends to arrive on time more often. I've been stuck at a bust stop for an hour only to have all 3 scheduled buses arrive at the same time. They were all stuck in traffic.
Light rail trends have shown they have a lot of green space around them. Even the space between the tracks is inlayed with grass. A bus line feels temporary while rail stations are permanent. Rail favours development.
a) It's faster because it does not get stuck in traffic usually (mostly runs in its own tracks).
b) It's more comfortable. The ride is smoother. It's quieter. It's more spacious and you're more likely to find a good seat.
I live in a city with many teams and busses and I surely prefer the trams.
E-class trams [1] that are being deployed (46 in service and more added each month) here in Melbourne can carry up to 210 passengers (64 seated, 146 standing).
[monorail song here]
Note that all rides are free this weekend!