Quote Originally Posted by Jason View Post
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.
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!