Originally Posted by
nain rouge
Detroit has 5,000 people per square mile. You can't financially support great transit at that level. Tokyo, by comparison, has a density of 16,000 per square mile at a population of 13,000,000. Paris has an urban area of 10,000,000 with a population density of 9,500 per square mile. We're not even discussing the densities of the inner cities yet.
In America, with light rail, we're putting the cart before the horse, cutting corners the whole way, and hoping the horse magically shows up. If we want good transit in Detroit, we first need to ask how we can get the urban area of our metro up to at least 5,000 people per square mile. Right now, we're at 2,700 per square mile with a population of 3,700,000. Whatever light rail we can scrounge together is going to be an ineffective mess that will only look good in comparison to the complete, abject failure we're deploying on the streets right now.
Truth is, to get density up in Metro Detroit, we'd either need to abandon big chunks of the suburbs or big chunks of Detroit. Right now, we're abandoning Detroit and pursuing even lower density. We need to prioritize one way or the other.