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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.

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.

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[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...

The problem is not street cars vs busses it's busses vs cars. If you let cars onto the same lanes as busses then they become worse than cars. Effectively you can have a high bandwidth street level public transit or congestion because cars don't scale at street level.

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.

It's a fact that GM set up a shadow corporation to buy up a lot of cities streetcar lines with the stated intention of selling more automobiles.

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?

> Paved streets could be added much more quickly than streetcar lines

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.

> 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 [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

> 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.

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/

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.

It's not entirely a messaging problem; long bus trips are a great way to catch diseases from poor people who are traveling sick.

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.

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.

In New York City, it is illegal to move between subway cars, by using the end doors.

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.

I haven't spent much time in NYC but I had never seen people go through the doors as passengers until then. It seemed to be frequent/common too. I've since seen this once in another city and it was pretty clear that it was out-of-the-ordinary when it happened.

I think part of the issue is that in areas where there's not super abundant public transit that the majority of the population uses instead of cars, the likelihood of having a negative encounter with the type of people that are so unpleasant that you'd normally do anything possible to avoid them goes up significantly. My personal anecdote: when I lived in DC I never had any problems with the Metro buses or trains even in the poorer areas. When I lived in a coastal county in the panhandle of Florida I would sometimes take a bus on one of the very few lines that existed, serviced exclusively by very small buses and only a few times a day. During one of my trips I had to step in to stop this older man in his late 30's from physically harassing underage girls which led to police involvement. Turns out that he had been a problem for the bus line for a while but they couldn't ban him from the system because he was threatening to involve some civil liberties group in a discrimination case. I stopped taking the bus after that.

Yes this is unfortunately a problem everywhere, and I've seen this situation sometimes in Austin, Texas. In addition to untoward incidents like you mention, there are often homeless people taking the bus in the summers, I beleive simply to get a respite from the heat in the air conditioned buses. And while this might sound incredibly elitist, their stench is so bad I would frequently have to try for another bus.

Projects like this are test cases for the viability of these projects. It's probably a good idea to build where the demand is to show that people will actually catch these things then move on to areas where demand is not a certainty.

> We have much bigger problems than transportation of tourists, shoppers, and whoever is going to spend money at some trendy restaurant.

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.

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.