Why this hasn't come to pass, comes down to a couple of very simple things.

1. The "region", which doesn't truly exist in any corporeal sense, has absolutely no source of money which can be used to pay for the operation of this line. The fact that we are really not a region, but well over 100+ fractious communities often in contention with each other, is why almost nothing of any value is ever done around here.

2. The freight railroads were not all 100% cooperative with SEMCOG's efforts to plan this; and in any case there was no money laying around which could be readily used to make the necessary improvements to run this service.

The big one - watch for it now - here it comes:

3. We have no regional transit authority, with a dedicated and secure source of funding, which is why we do not get any reasonable amount of federal transit funding. Until we have our shit together as a geographic region, with regard to having a willingness to actually provide enough money to run a decent transit system, we will NEVER have a decent transit system in any form.

Metro Detroit spends about 1/3 as much per capita on transit as other regions of similar population. That's why our system doesn't work well and why we can't seem to get anything done: we are not willing to pay for it. Until that changes, nothing else will.