By: Jeff Gerrit

In his 1936 essay "The Crack-Up," novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said real intelligence is the ability to "see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." Seventy-five years later, anyone who has fought for mass transit in southeast Michigan can still feel him.

Despite a soul-shriveling history of detours and dead-ends, transit advocates throughout the suburbs and in this great city keep pushing. [[And, yes, I consider Detroit a great city. If that makes me deluded as well as intelligent, I'll gladly accept both tags.)

The latest shot of hope is the Woodward Light Rail Project, a $500-million public-private partnership to run electric rail cars 9.3 miles up and down Woodward, from Hart Plaza to 8 Mile. As a city resident, I want this as much as anyone.

But it's not a done deal, despite the unwavering confidence of Mayor Dave Bing and his project point man, Chief Financial Officer Norman White, who expect construction to start next year. The city and region can still blow this, and another failure would be near-fatal to efforts to build mass transit in this region.

Getting the money

The most immediate obstacle is collecting the $100 million pledged by private investors to complete Detroit's local match for federal New Starts money. City leaders and private investors continue to work out differences over design, alignment and other issues. Maybe half the cheddar -- including $35 million from the Kresge Foundation and $9 million from the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. -- is a sure bet.

Not getting the full $100 million would not kill the project, but to compete with other cities, Detroit must get most of it. Meeting with the Free Press editorial board in mid-April, the mayor told me he needs investors to commit within 30 days. Thirty days have passed and nothing definitive has happened. A spokesperson for the M-1 Rail leadership team declined to comment through an e-mail on Friday, other than to say "they are not comfortable commenting on something the mayor said in a meeting they were not present at."

Continued at: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/a...=2011105220456