MDOT Begins PEL Study for Gratiot from Downtown to 8 Mile

It will be interesting to what MDOT recommends. Personally, I would love to BRT running down the middle of Gratiot from Downtown to 8 Mile.

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The Planning and Environmental Linkages [[PEL) study for M-3 [[Gratiot Avenue) from Randolph Street to M-102 [[8 Mile Road) in Detroit will identify and evaluate safety, multimodal mobility, transit needs, and proposed improvements. The PEL study will help to refine the recommendations of existing plans and studies to create one unified vision for the corridor.The Gratiot Avenue PEL study will also evaluate:

• Safety issues for nonmotorized users
• Abundance of travel lanes
• Lack of nonmotorized facilities
• High transit use
• Sidewalk lighting and maintenance
• A proposed road diet with dedicated center transit lanes and medians

The PEL study will consider environmental, community, and economic goals early in the transportation planning process. The information analysis and services or recommendations developed during the PEL study will inform the environmental review process.

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https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/projec...m-3-in-detroit

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Originally Posted by Airforceguy

It will be interesting to what MDOT recommends. Personally, I would love to BRT running down the middle of Gratiot from Downtown to 8 Mile.

https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/projec...m-3-in-detroit

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Welcome to La-La land.

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Originally Posted by Airforceguy

Personally, I would love to BRT running down the middle of Gratiot from Downtown to 8 Mile.

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1000% agree! BRT with dedicated right-of-way and signal prioritization.

I lived in Berlin and have made frequent trips to Bogota. A BRT [[when properly done) is indistinguishable from a train at 20% the cost per mile. What's more is the build time is significantly faster than traditional rail. Unless the federal Government suddenly decides to spend Marshall Plan amounts of money on mass transit, BRT is our best bet for a fast and reliable mass transit in our lifetime.

I don't see it happening as people will throw a fit at the idea of losing a lane or busses having signal priority, but I would certainly love to be proven wrong :)

Now is the time to pitch major transit improvements! let's fire off those public comments, comrades. I included this bullet list in my comment to them, and would encourage everyone here to send them your personal take especially if you live along Gratiot.

My suggestions would be to commission committees on a lan of implementation for the following infrastructural improvements to Gratiot:


• dedicated transit lanes for BRT and modernized stations like the Grand Rapids system
• an M-3 light rail line that would conveniently connect to the existing M-1 rail, thus expanding coverage to our fledgeling transit network. with a new light rail up and down Gratiot, stations and park-and-rides at the major intersections, and connectivity to the Qline, 100,000 Detroiters or more would be newly connected to efficient transit.
• a DPM extension spur connecting from the Cadillac Center station [[at Gratiot and Randolph) to the Eastern Market, with stops at St. Antoine [[Ford Field), Russell Street [[Eastern Market), and St. Aubin [[Lafayette Park). this could be a potentially major improvement to the People Mover, connecting to the DPM station most obviously and readily equipped to accommodate a transfer line, offer a PERFECT connector from downtown to the Eastern Market, which would boost commerce and activity in both districts tenfold on weekends and also offer EM more accessibility during the week, and add 30,000 residents in walkable range to the DPM network.
• lane space reallocation by way of dedicated cycle lanes, decreased street parking, and a road diet to increase traffic safety while simultaneously making way for space for these city-transforming transit improvements.


I hope MDOT and the directors of this process will see the import and urgency of expanding our local transit options, and I hope we of the immediate community can continue having a guiding voice in this process.

Gratiot consistently has a very high number of pedestrian fatalities and high speed crashes. No surface street should be designed in a way that allows drivers to go 60+ MPH, ever.

Light rail would be great, BRT would be the most feasible, but at a MINIMUM we need some kind of traffic calming measures to help prevent these dangerous accidents from happening. I don't care if they put in bike lanes that three people use a year, anything to help tamper down the recklessness of that road would be welcomed.

EDIT: You can submit your ideas/comments to MDOT in this form.

First, it's ridiculous to only consider going to 8 Mile. Extending it to Mt. Clemens or at least to Macomb Mall makes more sense. Second, the dedicated lanes should not be closed off to vehicle traffic. Just like you're able to ride in the lane that the Q-Line travels on Woodward, the same should be allowed when travelling on Gratiot with a BRT. If Gratiot is shrunken down to make room for bike lanes, another lane closure for a ROW lane for BRT would make Gratiot a parking lot.

Third, Kuuma, your ideas are a little too much pie in the sky. Why favor BRT and insist on light rail as well? Either it's going to be one or the other. And please, everyone, no more talk about extending the People Mover. We should be talking about removing it. It's ancient technology that we will never see again. It serves it's purpose. That's my two cents.

It should be noted, even today with the massive depopulation on the east side, Gratiot in the city proper still handles significantly more vehicular traffic than the other arterial roads [[Woodward included).

So what worked for those streets [[dedicated transit lanes, bike lanes, medians, etc.) may not necessarily work for Gratiot.

Not so sure about MDOT doing studies considering how many lanes that want to create for surface level boulevard for the I-375 project. Also considering the condition of the roads in Michigan.

In any case Michigan and E. Jefferson Ave have had road diets but still quite a pain to cross as a pedestrian. Do like the Michigan Ave future proposals with the elevated bike paths, center transit median, and pedestrian bump outs. Maybe that could be replicated for Gratiot but instead of have 2 dedicated center lanes for autonomous vehicles it would be for BRT.

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Originally Posted by royce

And please, everyone, no more talk about extending the People Mover. We should be talking about removing it. It's ancient technology that we will never see again. It serves it's purpose. That's my two cents.

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Whether or not it's a good idea to expand is its own discussion, but the technology is definitely not ancient, and metro lines using the same technology are still being built around the world.

The signalling system, which is what allows it to be automated, is SelTrac, one of the most common signalling systems in the world. Even systems that aren't fully automated still use it to partially automate operations with human supervision. The People Mover has updated the signalling system to a more recent version since being built. And the methods it uses to keep track of vehicle location are the same or similar as other signalling systems, which means it could be switched to another signalling system if it needed to.

The other distinctive part of the system are the linear induction motors which move the vehicles. Thousands of metro vehicles from around the world are currently running using LIMs, and all of the major train manufacturers have made them before. Guangzhou in China has over 75 miles of LIM metro. Vancouver has 38 miles, Tokyo has 25 miles, plus 6 other lines across Japan. Beijing has 18 miles. Seoul has 12 miles. Kuala Lumpur has 29 miles. They've been built regularly since the 80s, most of them in the last 10 years, with more under construction right now.

Finally, our system has short vehicles and station platforms. Even though it uses metro vehicles, it's a people mover, not a metro. But it can be extended into a metro with the "light metro" concept that has been growing in popularity around the world. The idea is that a 2 car train coming every 2 minutes has the same capacity as a 10 car train coming every 10 minutes [[1 train car worth of capacity per minute), but with much smaller capital costs because of the small stations. The maximum frequency of automated systems are about 1.5 minutes, and each People Mover vehicle has a capacity of about 100 [[so 200 per pair). That's 8,000 people per hour. Getting new modern 3 car trains and extending the platforms where possible could very practically get the capacity up to 12,800 people per hour. For comparison, a bus coming every 20 minutes is 120 people per hour. I doubt we would ever need more capacity than that.

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Originally Posted by royce

First, it's ridiculous to only consider going to 8 Mile. Extending it to Mt. Clemens or at least to Macomb Mall makes more sense. Second, the dedicated lanes should not be closed off to vehicle traffic. Just like you're able to ride in the lane that the Q-Line travels on Woodward, the same should be allowed when travelling on Gratiot with a BRT. If Gratiot is shrunken down to make room for bike lanes, another lane closure for a ROW lane for BRT would make Gratiot a parking lot.

Third, Kuuma, your ideas are a little too much pie in the sky. Why favor BRT and insist on light rail as well? Either it's going to be one or the other. And please, everyone, no more talk about extending the People Mover. We should be talking about removing it. It's ancient technology that we will never see again. It serves it's purpose. That's my two cents.

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It's not ridiculous. Let's take it one city at a time. The Qline would had been more effective if it would had traveled north to 8 mile road instead of to only Grand Blvd.

The only downfall of these reconstructed streets such as Kercheval, Mack, Cass, and others that have bike lanes installed is that there are no passing lanes for vehicles. Trucks and busses traveling on these roads causes traffic jams inless cars illegally pass around the busses in the yellow turning lanes.

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Originally Posted by royce

Third, Kuuma, your ideas are a little too much pie in the sky. Why favor BRT and insist on light rail as well? Either it's going to be one or the other. And please, everyone, no more talk about extending the People Mover. We should be talking about removing it. It's ancient technology that we will never see again. It serves it's purpose. That's my two cents.

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of course we're not gonna get 100% of this list – but it's our job to offer our ideal scenarios in the public comments. its our job to visualize the kind of city/community/infrastructure we want, not to scale our dreams back with hypothetical budgets. that's gonna happen in the process anyway, and obviously we're facing an uphill battle with MDOT who may well be named MI Dept of Cars, but I'd be remiss not to open the conversation as idealistically as possible and find a workable solution through that, rather than think small and have the dreamier ideas never even enter the conversation.

BRT vs Light Rail, of course I'd rather see light rail, tbh I think BRT is usually a half-measure for road-centric thinkers to dodge the question of rail, but you better believe the suits at MDOT are gonna seldom think of either so it's important for both ideas to be collected in the public comment period.

not gonna argue with you about the people mover, because the idea that it currently serves its purpose is a gag. it fully does not, IMO it's a stunted and unambitious image of what it could be if only it actually connected to residential neighborhoods – not to mention a chance to outsource parking away from downtown and give people shuttle access into the downtown without making downtown itself the parking garage. in Gratiot we have all these opportunities, so i'm gonna keep shouting my pie in the sky until the other people who haven't already given up hear it.

^ kudos

The key word is connectivity,in order to get a light rail or street car system going it is going to be heavily reliant on federal tax dollars,in order to do that one needs to connect cores.

IE : Downtown Detroit to Downtown Highland park

Downtown Detroit to Downtown Hamtramck or whatever is the closest hub outside the city limits or the shortest distance to start out with.

Once that main leg is in place you can branch off from there,you will drive yourself crazy with all of this piecemeal little runs.

FTA looks at the amount of people potentially impacted by a given run,if a mainline is run from for instance downtown Detroit to downtown Hamtramck then you have doubled your ridership capabilities while covering the city from one end to the other with a single line.

Clearly your local politicians are more interested in getting in front of the cameras and talking about how they look out for you versus actually doing something so you are at a brick wall when it comes to the political clout that you need.

But you do have at least 2 people there that do have that clout,one is already pro transit with the street car he already established and the other one is more into bridges but they both have what you need to get it done.

You can contact both parties,either directly or by email,they will respond.

You do not need a RTA to do a main line,all you need is the city of Detroit to be onboard and the connecting hub city to be onboard as a joint venture that benefits both parties.

Do not get frustrated by people telling you what you cannot do because people are implementing systems all over the country,so you can do it,it’s like anything else,it’s never that easy.