Quote Originally Posted by Det_ard View Post
Transit to/from the airport would be good, but since less than 5% of the MSA's workers work downtown, and the percent of the region living downtown is way lower than that, trips to downtown are less important than making sure there's a regional transit network. If downtown is where you hook into it, great, but the vast majority of flyers aren't going downtown.
Generally speaking, train-to-plane systems tend to connect the airport with the transportation hub. Like the subway to JFK in New York goes into Manhattan. Or the way the buses go to Port Authority or Grand Central Terminal or Penn Station. That way, people can have easy access to their secondary destination.

I wonder about the relevance of using where metro Detroiters work as the barometer of where a link to the airport should go. Are people hopping off the plane to go to work?

For a region as sprawled-out as metro Detroit, you could argue there is no fixed-route transit system that will serve a majority of the people who use the airport. But what you CAN do is connect it to the best-transit-served, densest route in the metro.

I think it would make sense, for instance to have a train run from downtown out to the airport, with a few stops in Dearborn, maybe one in Wayne, and a few in Detroit as well. It's possible to swing the route out another way after the proposed downtown station. What are your ideas?