Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
No, the People Mover itself isn't a problem. The problem is that the larger system did not materialize around it. If you are familiar with the NYC subway system, it would be like building the Times Square to Grand Central Shuttle without building the rest of the subway system.
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ca
It's hard to make a rapid transit system provide coverage to the entirety of a city's downtown unless you're planning to build many interconnecting lines. Bus connections are possible, but buses tend to get stuck in traffic, especially downtown, and they can have reliability issues since their routes usually stretch far into outlying neighborhoods.
For a very basic rapid transit system, it makes sense to build a cheaper circulator system as a complement that bridges the last mile between rapid transit stations and people's actual destinations in "greater" downtown areas. There are different kinds of circulators, from DC's circulator bus system on regular city streets to the Portland Streetcar to the elevated people movers in Detroit, Miami, and Jacksonville.
My guess is that Detroit planners saw the city's neighborhoods in free-fall and figured it was easier to start with a downtown loop, with the support of big downtown employers like banks and government agencies, than to build all the spokes and deal with neighborhood politics. At the time, planners also saw benefit in linking downtown employers and businesses to more plentiful parking lots and garages on the edges of downtown, beyond convenient walking distance. Today, I think we recognize the folly of building transit to support further auto use.
I still think the People Mover has value today, though! As I mentioned previously, there's no way to get Amtrak trains close to downtown Detroit. But the People Mover could easily bridge that gap, with an extension to Michigan Central Station or other sites (New Center is a little too far), and it would already link to almost all of downtown Detroit. There's also other up-and-coming attractions and neighborhoods just outside the Lodge/Fisher/Chrysler freeway loop that the People Mover could connect to. It's definitely an asset that could be very handy in the future with some tweaks.