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Originally Posted by Busy Bee
Calling the Detroit People Mover and the Vancouver Sky Train the same technology in this situation is a little bit like saying a go-cart and an automobile or a toy boat and a real boat are comparable because they're "the same technology."
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It's the exact same system, built by the same company during the same time with the same vehicles, and it even has the same chimes. They are the exact same thing except Detroit's was shaped as a one way circulator loop and Vancouver's was a two way metro line.
There's a small amount of irony though. Detroit has a downtown circulator but no metro. Vancouver has a metro but no downtown circulator. imo Vancouver would be better served by making a DPM-esque circulator loop than by the streetcar circulator that they're currently looking at.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
There is no plan to expand it because it's impossible and makes no sense. The city is better off focusing on a dedicated light rail system.
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Technologically, it's easy to expand. All that would happen is one of the elevated guideway segments would be replaced to add a rail switch. Maybe one of the stations would be rebuilt for more operating options.
The thing with building a light rail system is that in order for it to have worthwhile service quality, it needs to be grade separated. The expensive part of a People Mover expansion is the elevated guideway, and a proper light rail system would be mostly elevated. A PM expansion would be cheaper to build than Seattle's light rail line which cost $179 million per mile (our expansion would be $100-$150 per mile).
But a PM expansion would have ideal service quality. The People Mover comes twice as frequently all day long as Seattle does during peak hours, has a higher capacity, near perfect reliability, and lower operating costs, than Seattle's light rail line. With more vehicles the People Mover could have max frequencies of something like 75 seconds (possibly lower) which is physically impossible for light rail to do.
For Detroit transit, a People Mover expansion really should be the goal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by plutonicpanda
Would it make sense to replace the people move with a two way elevated light rail system?
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It would cost like a half billion dollars, and the two way operation would only add a modest ridership bump. Also, there's physically not space for two way stations and two way guideway to fit between the buildings downtown.
However, it's hypothetically possible to make the current system two way by adding some passing tracks. It takes 16 minutes to do the loop, so if you had 4 equidistantly spaced passing tracks you could have trains coming every 4 minutes without them crashing into each other. But it probably wouldn't be worth the cost.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The North One
^ Exactly
I don't think there's any hope for the people mover today. It's future is demolition and I think it's a huge eyesore anyway. I want it gone.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Busy Bee
How about a demo. It's an urban mistake that should be rectified.
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The People Mover has, iirc, 4th or 5th highest ridership in the RTA area. AAATA doesn't have any higher routes, and for SMART only the Gratiot bus is higher. DDOT only has a few that are higher than the People Mover and they're not
that much higher. The QLine had less ridership even when it was free.
It's also a service that can't be replicated in any other way. It's physically impossible to have the same frequency and speed with an at grade system.
Right now the People Mover is used as a parking shuttle for commuters and event goers. Without the People Mover, downtown's parking would be a lot less efficient and you'd be seeing hundreds of millions of dollars in parking garages built in order to make up the difference.
The People Mover is also used in order to get around during conventions and other events. During big events ridership spikes, and while some of those trips could be made by walking or uber, a lot can't. Imagine how much money the restaurants in Greektown would lose if convention goers and office workers on the west side of downtown stopped going there. What about the hotel rooms that Detroit is still struggling to build? Right now all of the hotels downtown are essentially connected to the convention center, but without the People Mover only a handful are within convenient walking distance.
The People Mover handles 2 million trips per year. Without it, most of those trips don't happen and those trips are business.
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Originally Posted by pianowizard
^I personally do find the People Mover useful, and don't think it's an eyesore. But it's a huge money sink, costing the city and state over $10 million each year. I agree its future is demolition.
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The People Mover is about $10 million per year and has about 2 million trips per year, and DDOT is $126 million per year and has about 25 million trips, so they're on par with each other. The subsidy per trip is similar to many SMART routes.
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Originally Posted by Crawford
Not true. DPM projected ridership was 70k weekday passengers upon completion. It was promoted as a heavy usage system that would work both as a standalone, and in conjunction with future rail lines.
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The People Mover is explicitly called a circulator/distributor in all documents related to it. It's even in the name. People movers are a category of transportation system which fulfill circulation/distribution functions (at airports, amusement parks, downtowns, universities, etc.).
The projected ridership was for 1990, a decade after the EIS, and a 7 years after the intended opening date. The numbers optimistically assume that the decline in the 1970s would be reversed and that downtown would flourish. They also assumed that some projects would happen that didn't. For example, they have Cadillac Centre being the most heavily used station, presumably because there was supposed to be a big urban shopping mall there connected to a still-open Hudsons. I'm also guessing that they didn't have a good way of modeling circulator services (which was part of the point of the federal government's program in the first place). Even if you assumed today's daytime population, to get to 71,000 trips per day you'd "only" need about 1/3rd of people to make one round trip a day, but obviously that was way off.