Proposed Free Shuttle connecting Ferndale, Royal Oak, Avenue of Fashion

This is about 3 weeks old, but nobody started a thread on it.

Ferndale is proposing a new shuttle, called the Fab Cab. It would go through downtown Royal Oak, the zoo, Pleasant Ridge, Ferndale, and the Avenue of Fashion District, and University of Detroit-Mercy

It would run on weekends from 10 am to midnight

What do you think?

http://www.freep.com/story/news/loca...uses/99712322/

Really cool that it includes U of D and the avenue of fashion. Did birmingham poo-poo the idea?

I hang out in Royal Oak and Ferndale. I wish that Avenue of Fashion get some serious stores and boutique and not junk stores where the owners are just trying their hands in being entrepreneurs and not open most of the time and don't have change to give you after a purchase

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Originally Posted by masterblaster

Ferndale is proposing a new shuttle, called the Fab Cab. It would go through downtown Royal Oak, the zoo, Pleasant Ridge, Ferndale, and the Avenue of Fashion District, and University of Detroit-Mercy

It would run on weekends from 10 am to midnight...

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The only issue I have with it is that it is apparently going to be a summer thing. It would be more useful to the UDM kids if it ran at least during part of the school year. I understand not running it in mid-winter, but fall and spring?

Any of my Ferndale peeps out there want to work on this?

Part of me thinks that if the light rail [[or BRT or maybe even just current bus routes) is built on Woodward that it should shift over to Livernois at McNichols. It would hit up UDM, the Avenue of Fashion, actual functioning residential neighborhoods [[not golf courses. But it would still be within walking distance of Palmer Park), and continuing on Livernois to the north it would hit downtown Ferndale which is where it'd be going anyway.

I don't know what the transit terminology is. But how routes are planned for mental clarity. Making a route that strictly follows a single commonly understood road so that everyone knows where the route goes, vs making a route that hits up commonly understood locations but where the path in between those locations meanders and isn't relevant. The route would already deviate from Woodward to hit Royal Oak, so it could make sense to switch to the destination-based routing a little earlier and hit up place that people actually want to go.


That's a bit of a tangent but I hope this does well. It says something that these governments and institutions are going out of their way to coordinate and spend money on this.

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Originally Posted by Jason

Part of me thinks that if the light rail [[or BRT or maybe even just current bus routes) is built on Woodward that it should shift over to Livernois at McNichols. It would hit up UDM, the Avenue of Fashion, actual functioning residential neighborhoods [[not golf courses. But it would still be within walking distance of Palmer Park), and continuing on Livernois to the north it would hit downtown Ferndale which is where it'd be going anyway.

I don't know what the transit terminology is. But how routes are planned for mental clarity. Making a route that strictly follows a single commonly understood road so that everyone knows where the route goes, vs making a route that hits up commonly understood locations but where the path in between those locations meanders and isn't relevant. The route would already deviate from Woodward to hit Royal Oak, so it could make sense to switch to the destination-based routing a little earlier and hit up place that people actually want to go.

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This is constantly one of the philosophical differences among various transit planners. The two sides of the argument as I understand them are do you make a transit route as direct as possible, so that people can travel as quickly as possible between points, or do you build routes such as the one you suggest such that it serves as many reasonably transit-supportive places as possible between the endpoints?

DDOT routes have always been a combination of the two; SMART bus routes are mostly direct. Of course, any single route can't serve both purposes; if we had sufficient funds for a really robust system you could have different routes partly along the same corridor to handle the two different philosophies.

Thanks for posting!