And Yet Again, the Suburbs/State Screw Detroit Over

[Wesley Mouch]

People here seem to conveniently forget that for one brief moment we did start on the way to a combined system. After years of resistance from SEMTA and its successor, SMART, Mayor Dennis Archer was finally able to pressure them into considering the combining of some routes as a beginning move towards a regional system.

But the people who ran SMART decided to torpedo it by dragging their feet on combining routes and having their buses make city stops, and then killed it off entirely by campaigning their own funding and cutting DOT out of the deal. Given the history, and suburban resistance [[personified delightfully on this thread by Cliffy) to doing a damn thing with us on anything like a fair basis, I see no reason to dissolve DOT and give folks who don't really care about our riders control of our transit system. And this most recent action by SEMCOG has only served to strengthen that conviction.

Conveniently forget? Its called history. Best left in the past. Better to deal with today. Better results.