Non-Woodward rail priorities

[Joseph C. Krause]

Putting Woodward aside for a thought experiment, what makes sense if the M1/DDOT system were to be expanded to other arteries? "Everything" is an easy answer [[and a good one), but let's limit it. Where would you put the next 8 miles of track? 20 miles?

8 miles could connect City Airport to downtown via Gratiot, and continue down Michigan to 14th Street and give a reason for MCS to be renovated to be used for its original purpose. And as a side-effect, that entire area would suddenly have much better access to Eastern Market.

Going down Michigan alone, it could split at 14th and head down Vernor thereafter, connecting downtown with one of the most vibrant areas of the city.

But Gratiot has some of the highest bus ridership after Woodward. If the means weren't there to run a line to Mt. Clemens, how far would it need to go to be useful?

What about a rail on most or all arteries, but terminating at Grand Boulevard? It wouldn't connect the suburbs, but it would allow everyone in the "inner" city to treat downtown as a real downtown.

Or would you just run a line directly to your house?

[Meddle]

If they do it, they would have to do Gratiot to Mt. Clemens, Woodward to at least Royal Oak if not further, Grand River to Farmington and Michigan to Canton Twp. Possibly something on Fort Street or Jefferson to downriver.

Anything less would be wasteful.

[BrushStart]

I think Michigan Avenue has to be the highest priority behind Woodward as Michigan is still a dense urban corridor all the way to Dearborn. There are also a lot of destinations worth connecting along Michigan. If I were prince of the city, a Michigan Ave line [[outside of downtown) should have stops at Rosa Parks [[Corktown), W. Grand Blvd [[Mexicantown), Livernois [[Mexicantown/SW), Schaefer [[East Dearborn and Ford), Greenfield, Evergreen [[UofM, Fairlane, Greenfield Village, HF Museum), and the last stop would be Military [[downtown W. Dearborn).

[Meddle]

A Michigan Ave. line couldn't stop at Dearborn. It would have to go all the way to Ypsi. Canton/I-275 at the very least.

[Meddle]

In fact, those might be the initial limits with options for expansion:

Michigan to I-275; expandable to Ypsilanti
Grand River to M5
Woodward to I-696; expandable to Pontiac
Gratiot to I-696, expandable to Mt. Clemens

Scheduled commuter line from Metro Airport to downtown. [[The taxi cab and limo drivers oughta' love that one!)

[Rocko]

If they do it, they would have to do Gratiot to Mt. Clemens, Woodward to at least Royal Oak if not further, Grand River to Farmington and Michigan to Canton Twp. Possibly something on Fort Street or Jefferson to downriver.

WE HAD THIS EXACT SYSTEM 100 YEARS AGO!!!

I had never considered the Gratiot to City Airport AND Michigan to MCS option, but I think that's a good one. Mexicantown/Southwest should definitely be linked via a branch at Roosevelt Park to Vernor. My other immediate vote would be East Jefferson to Alter Road. Very wide ROW in the street means there's room for streetcar tracks, lots of commerce on the corridor and many decent neighborhoods within a few blocks of the street.

[professorscott]

Actually it isn't necessary to speculate on this, because the answer is out there, in two different forms. First of all there is the RTCC 2008 Regional Transit Plan which calls for light rail, eventually, on two corridors I believe, Woodward and Gratiot.

If you don't like that plan, look at the bus routes with the most ridership [[which can be inferred from frequency of service). If you are focusing on Detroit and the near suburbs, among the busiest lines after Woodward are Gratiot, Dexter, Grand River, Crosstown, Fort. If you are focusing on regional travel, it's Gratiot, Fort, Michigan.

From a DDOT point of view, Michigan Avenue doesn't even get into the same ZIP code as the top list. The Dexter runs every 12 minutes [[and none of you were thinking about Dexter); Michigan is, what, every 45 minutes. But if you add in SMART's service it becomes more feasible.

This is an interesting talk but to make it productive we must have a regional authority. Unfortunately I believe that is a dead issue in Lansing nowadays.

[Vox]

Did you guys come in to some money or something?

[iheartthed]

1. Transit wise, the absolute most important thing that Detroit needs to do besides the Woodward rail is get a commuter rail line to connect Metro with downtown [[most likely via the New Center Amtrak station).

2. Rail link on Michigan Avenue to Dearborn, connecting MCS and southwest Detroit to downtown. MCS will absolutely be the site of any high speed rail station should a line ever be built, and southwest Detroit was the fastest [[only?) growing section of Detroit for the past two censuses. So you have two birds knocked out with one stone.

3. Gratiot connecting downtown to city airport and beyond. This is a lower priority though since city airport probably won't serve commercial flights again for quite some time.

While we're on the subject, I think the city should establish a goal of making it possible to live anywhere within the Blvd loop without needing a car by 2020. If Detroit can do that then it will be every bit as competitive as Chicago or any northeast corridor city.

[professorscott]

While we're on the subject, I think the city should establish a goal of making it possible to live anywhere within the Blvd loop without needing a car by 2020. If Detroit can do that then it will be every bit as competitive as Chicago or any northeast corridor city.

Laudable goal, how would you define "possible to live without a car"? I would say there are probably tens of thousands of people living within the Blvd without a car right now, but obviously the current state of transit creates challenges for such people.

If we can come up with a good definition, I would be happy to bring it to the attention of Council, see if it floats.

[Parkguy]

All good ideas. If you go by current ridership, Woodward and Grand River would be the top two. Gratiot has some major cost problems for rail because of the number of bridges that would have to be built, as I understand it. Grand River has a bunch of expressway overpasses right now, and I don't know how much they would have to be modified to take light rail. I think Michigan Ave. is the best route for the second line, because we need to connect to the airport right away. There are tentative plans to run commuter trains with a shuttle service from Michigan and Merriman to the airport using existing Amtrack tracks, but we'll see if that gets off the ground. I think the best short-term answer is probably rapid bus until rail lines can be built, especially on Grand River, Gratiot, East Jefferson, Dexter, Michigan Ave., and a couple of crosstown routes, including Eight Mile. Plus we need a regional authority, and the lines need to serve at least out to the inner-ring suburbs. I'd like to see commuter trains out to Ann Arbor, Mt. Clemens, Pontiac-- at least.

[birwood]

My late father had 37 years with the DSR now D-DOT and during the years mid 70's when Mayor Young wanted his subway, he had his DSR-Plans & Schedualing teams do a Mass Transit survey, a calculation of routes, travel times, mileage, of the entire metro detroit area. They used existing rail lines that parallelled Van Dyke, Grandriver/Scholcraft, Michigan Ave, Fort St. ETC. and using the mile roads as bus equiped cross connector routes. The thought was that people had to get to from Port Huron to Metro Airport, Monroe to Pine Knob, Brighton to the Autoshow/Tiger Stadium in an effecient manner and the New Center Area or Downtown would act as the LOOP as in Chicago. The thing that held up this program was that, what entity, D-DOT or SEMTA, was going to be in charge. It was never resolved, the plans were shelved BUT where are those plans today? Many, many of those questions asked by people today about a new Lightrail/Masstransit system could be answered if those plans could be found somewhere in the city archives. It would be interesting to find out where they are?

[laphoque]

Did you guys come in to some money or something?

We don't have money. Which means we can't expand the freeways. Mass transit reduces the density of cars on the street for less than the cost of expanding freeways.

[iheartthed]

Laudable goal, how would you define "possible to live without a car"? I would say there are probably tens of thousands of people living within the Blvd without a car right now, but obviously the current state of transit creates challenges for such people.

If we can come up with a good definition, I would be happy to bring it to the attention of Council, see if it floats.

Good question. I would define "possible to live without a car" as being able to do four things without use of a car:

1. Travel between jobs center [[i.e. downtown) and home within a 30 minute time span.
   
2. Travel between home and grocery stores within a 15 minute time span.
   
3. Travel between home and leisure activities [[i.e. bar districts, museums, etc.) within a 40 minute time span.
   
4. Travel between home and inter-city transportation hubs [[i.e. airports, train stations, bus stations) within a 75 minute time span.

So from the farthest point in the Grand Blvd loop, you should be able to do this all on a daily basis, during reasonable hours, without needing to own a car. If Detroit can do this then it can compete with any city in America.

[Corktown Mark]

Rail travel to Metro and travel from Dearborn, Westland to Downtown have the highest ridership potential. What it lacks is political support from politicians in Oakland county.

[Meddle]

^^ Screw Patterson County.

[Joseph C. Krause]

I like seeing different interpretations of how to scale things with limited resources. There are many shelved plans, many of them good, for transit. In addition to the Young-era survey mentioned above, there was a 1950s plan which included a Conner line. The blogger from "Mapping The Strait" made a map of that proposed system, visible here:

http://mapdetroit.blogspot.com/2010/...e-transit.html

One of the reasons to have a discussion like this even if it does not square with the real work being done is to allow one's imagination to try out concepts without cutting them short by simply saying things like "there's no money". Another very important muscle to build in our public discourse is that of fine-grained specificity. "We need transit" is more vague than "We need a center-running streetcar on the six main arterials connecting to interurbans." "We want open space" is less specific than "We want a series of small formal squares and courtyards punctuated by a large naturalistic park containing other recreational institutions within it."

As for paying for rail transit, the "we're broke" thing is tired. If it costs ten times more to maintain a paved road compared to a dirt road, let's start ripping up concrete North of Hall Road, cancel road expansion projects, and find some sections of interstate to eliminate completely. I understand this statement in our legal reality is rife with municipal obstacles, but if those are set aside for the sake of a thought experiment, it's clear that we as Michiganders could easily reallocate funds currently used on roads if we were actually serious.

[Don K]

1. Transit wise, the absolute most important thing that Detroit needs to do besides the Woodward rail is get a commuter rail line to connect Metro with downtown [[most likely via the New Center Amtrak station).

2. Rail link on Michigan Avenue to Dearborn, connecting MCS and southwest Detroit to downtown. MCS will absolutely be the site of any high speed rail station should a line ever be built, and southwest Detroit was the fastest [[only?) growing section of Detroit for the past two censuses. So you have two birds knocked out with one stone.

3. Gratiot connecting downtown to city airport and beyond. This is a lower priority though since city airport probably won't serve commercial flights again for quite some time.

While we're on the subject, I think the city should establish a goal of making it possible to live anywhere within the Blvd loop without needing a car by 2020. If Detroit can do that then it will be every bit as competitive as Chicago or any northeast corridor city.

I'd agree with this except I'd say MCS absolutely should not be the site for a high-speed-rail station in Detroit, for two reasons:

First, MCS is too big for any potential HSR usage. Even if HSR were to become popular enough to justify hourly trains to Chicago, the passenger loads wouldn't be large enough to justify the massive costs of restoring and maintaining this facility. When it was built, it was larger than MC/NYC needed, because they planned on luring the B&O, Pere Marquette, C&O, and Wabash out of Fort Street Station [[which never happened). And this was in an era of numerous MC/NYC trains to Chicago, New York, Toledo-Cleveland, and Mackinaw, and CP trains to Toronto. Yeah, I know big cities are supposed to have big train stations, but the remaining railroad palaces [[Boston South, New York Grand Central and Penn, Philadelphia 30th Street, Washington Union, Chicago Union, and Los Angeles Union) that are used primarily or solely as train stations have substantial commuter rail service in addition to Amtrak. Without that additional source of passengers, MCS wouldn't have the look or feel of a major rail hub to justify the space and cost.

Second, using MCS would eliminate the possibility of continuing the present extension of the Detroit-Chicago line through RO and Birmingham/Troy to Pontiac. If HSR is to be a success, it will have to get businessmen out of airplanes, not just tourists out of cars and buses. HSR absolutely could be time-competitive with planes between the Detroit area and Chicago at a top speed of 150 mph or so [[average of maybe 120), but if you tell someone from Chicago going to a meeting in Troy that he has to get off at MCS, then take a couple of light-rail rides plus a bus, or a taxi, or a limo, or rent a car to get to Troy, he's liable to say "screw it, I'll fly". Similarly, for someone living in the Bloomfields, Birmingham, or Troy, if you have to drive to MCS and find parking to catch the train, you're likely to drive just a little farther to Metro and take the plane.

In my working days I had numerous one-day trips to Chicago, and would have loved to be able to drive the ten minutes to Birmingham to take the train versus the 45 or so minutes to Metro, but if it's a choice between 45 minutes to Metro and 45 minutes to MCS, that would have to be an awfully damned fast train to get me to change modes.

Yes, we should be envisioning a city of Detroit that makes people want to live there again, but if you tell people in the burbs they have to go downtown to take the train, you're just dooming the train to failure, and not because of racism or anti-city bias, but just because you've eliminated the potential advantage of convenience the train has.

[Bham1982]

The Michigan Ave. bus has surprisingly low frequency and ridership.

Michigan is a little too far north to reach the Mexican population, and is pretty desolate just past Corktown [[though much healthier closer to Dearborn).

I think I would go with Gratiot. Much higher bus ridership is probably indicative of a more viable rail corridor.

[rhythmc]

While we're on the subject, I think the city should establish a goal of making it possible to live anywhere within the Blvd loop without needing a car by 2020. If Detroit can do that then it will be every bit as competitive as Chicago or any northeast corridor city.

I've thought the same thing for a while.

[Bham1982]

I was a little surprised at the Dexter bus frequency and ridership, as the Dexter corridor appears to be pretty bombed-out, but it makes sense.

First, Dexter travels through neighborhoods that were built very densely, so even with the depopulation. they're structurally much denser than most Detroit neighborhoods. These are the old Jewish multifamily neighborhoods, once thick with apartment buildings.

Second, Dexter travels through the wealthiest and most intact part of NW.

Third, I think Dexter ends at Northland, which is likely a big draw.

[mikeg19]

If they do it, they would have to do Gratiot to Mt. Clemens, Woodward to at least Royal Oak if not further, Grand River to Farmington and Michigan to Canton Twp. Possibly something on Fort Street or Jefferson to downriver.

Anything less would be wasteful.

I'd have to think this would be the most relevant plan, at least for a beginning. One, 8 mile track up Woodward isn't going to do anything to connect the city to the suburbs. Yes, it's a start, and it should spur development along the corridor, but if you don't have several lines branching out north, east, and west, what's the point? Why would someone from Mt. Clemens drive to Woodward to get on the LTR? Pointless. My only concern with this whole project is that it took this long to even get a plan in place to have the rail line up Woodward, how long and how much money is it going to take to utilize a plan to have one running up all the main roads out of Detroit? In our lifetimes? I doubt it.

[Gistok]

Did you guys come in to some money or something?

Whoa.... that's pretty cynical for someone who started a thread on PRT [[Personal Rapid Transit).... who's paying for that one??

[Rocko]

Does anyone have a link to accurate recent ridership stats for the current DDOT routes?

I do believe if you combine DDOT 37 Michigan and SMART's 200 Michigan, ridership is fair along the Michigan Avenue corridor. If you routed some traffic to southwest Detroit via Vernor to Roosevelt Park to tie into Michigan Ave. from that point toward downtown, there would be a decent amount of traffic going west out of downtown. Still, Gratiot may be the busier route.

Without the ridership figures in front of me, I think that of the non-spoke roads, the first three that would be good candidates [[based on where they serve and their current estimated DDOT usage) for light-rail operation would be Dexter, Crosstown [[Warren), and West Vernor. I also wonder what would happen if there was an Outer Drive loop stretching from Ecorse through SW, Allen Park, Dearborn, and all of Detroit over to Mack on the east side. Many current DDOT and SMART routes travel over a portion of Outer Drive, but none travel a significance distance to my knowledge.

Parkguy, what bridges are you referring to on Gratiot that could be a problem for light rail? I can only think of bridges over 94 and the Dequindre cut. The next bridge would be 696 waaaaaaay out in the boon docks

Don K, if MCS is not your vote for a high speed terminal and access to the wealthy of Oakland county is critical, where would you put a high speed terminal for Detroit?

Dexter or Crosstown would seem like good immediate candidates in addition to Gratiot [[and, in my opinion, East Jefferson). Dexter passes several schools in addition to going to Northland and passing several other institutions. I'm thinking about mapping out a route that generally follows the Dexter line but diverts at a few places to simplify things for rail. Crosstown has the best ridership of any crosstown route that I'm aware of and also connects several important places.

[ASR89]

Bus ridership.pdf

Here are some bus ridership figures I found a while back, but they aren't recent as I noticed it has figures for the now defunct Grand Belt line.