Original People Mover Proposal

[Dexlin]

It's been my understanding from some general research that the federal government had put together a program to fund downtown circulators, and that the major requirement for getting funding was that they had to show how it would fit into either an existing rapid transit system, or how it'd fit into a planned one. Since Detroit didn't have an existing rapid transit system, at the time, SEMTA [[the system that eventually became SMART after DDOT broke off) had come up with regional system, but internal squabbling - and the lack of true powers given to regional transit authorities in Michigan, at the time - halted the plan. By this time, Reagan became president and had majorly cut the budget to the downtown circulator program by the feds. SEMTA still ended up building it, but sold it off to the city either very shortly after completion of it or before, because of the massive cost overruns. It's my understanding that while they presented a regional transit plan to the feds, they didn't ever really allocate any money for the plan outside the immediate People Mover, so it's not as if the People Mover ate up the money for the regional plan, because the regional plan ever only existed on paper to satisfy the feds to give them money for the People Mover. In essence, by the time it came to build the People Mover, the regional plan had largely been abandoned, and SEMTA went through with the People Mover, anyway, mostly to save face.

I'm not sure that the regional rapid transit system was to use the same technology or even the same mode of transportation as the downtown circulator [[People Mover), but I was interested in old maps showing the lines for the regional system that was to feed into the People Mover. Gnome, I tried looking at the virtual motor city collection, but found one picture, and it was some People Mover exec.