Originally Posted by
mwilbert
I am not sufficiently familiar with Chicago to comment, but a large proportion of the people in New York and Washington use public transit because driving is much too annoying. And of course Manhattan as we know it could not exist at all without the subways. Washington could have twenty years ago, but I doubt that it could now.
You didn't mention Boston, but ignoring the expense, you have to be a bit of a masochist to drive in the central city. Tens of thousands of people with cars drive to satellite lots and take the trains and buses every weekday not because they can't afford to drive but because they don't want to. Hundreds of thousands more take public transit without using their cars at all, even though most of them have cars too.
Why is it hard to drive in central Boston? Partly because of the street layout, but mostly because there are so many people. To have a walkable environment, you need to have lots of people in a small area. That is very hard to accomplish without transit, because many people without transit requires many cars requires a lot of space for roads and parking. That space limits density and that is at least one reason why people think transit is important in general.
Whether Detroit is yet in a situation where transit would be important is a separate question, given that there is adequate parking and not terrible congestion downtown. I think the idea is that you already have a lot of public transit riders, but the current transit is not very attractive. If you put in something more attractive, you continue to serve your current riders but potentially attract new ones and signal your intentions to upgrade the urban experience in Detroit. We can only hope that someday that there is so much traffic that good public transit is a necessity.