Originally Posted by
Jason
My personal support for expanding the People Mover is because I think the People Mover provides much much higher quality service than other forms of transit. And I think it's so much better, that it changes the way people along the route use transit.
For light rail and buses if you want to use it you need to look up the schedule. Then you need to wait on a platform for who knows how long. And then maybe the train or bus is late. Driving yourself is convenient except for parking, which uber solves. But parking and uber can get expensive. To start using the bus or even light rail you have to willfully integrate it with your lifestyle but with the People Mover you don't.
With the People Mover, the frequency is so high that you don't have to think about schedules or anything. You just walk up the escalators to the platform, and in a few minutes you get whisked away to your destination.
A route from the airport to downtown would be great. There's a variety of different destinations, and a few businesses who could use their clout to make things easier politically, and maybe even contribute some money.
The airport would obviously love to be connected to downtown and also connect its terminals and parking. And it might make the project "for visitors" to some degree but that would also make it easier to have a tourist tax help pay for it.
The line could then go along I-94, where it would be relatively cheap to build.
Dearborn has a lot of destinations. Ford is investing a lot in its campus. They currently have 12,000 employees there and plan on consolidating offices into the two campuses up to 30,000 people. They would probably feel that good transit would help them attract talent. A stop at the Henry Ford Museum would serve a popular tourist destination and would provide access to the north part of their campus. Another stop or two within their campus as well as the Glass House would connect everything. Dearborn also has U of M Dearborn, which would be helpful politically, a hospital, Fairlane, a few other good development opportunities, and a little downtown.
Onto Michigan Avenue through Dearborn and Detroit there's a relative density of people and likely transit riders, a lot of longterm densification potential, and some DDOT and SMART bus routes that could be replaced.
I also think that the downtown and midtown interests would be supportive of an airport connection.
There's an argument that the People Mover can't be expanded because the curves are too sharp and the platforms are too short for the current model of train that Bombardier makes, but tracks are a lot more expensive than the train cars and they could just be custom ordered to be shorter.
But either way, a 25 mile line to the airport would cost billions of dollars. Now, it would be a one-time build, to have something high quality, with low operating costs, into perpetuity. And we spend just as much money on other things which aren't as beneficial. But still, I'm not holding my breath that we'll ever manage to commit that much money to anything.