[Jasoncw]

It's true that ridership pushing one mode past its physical limits justifies upgrading to a better mode. But it's also true that service quality drives ridership, and that different modes allow for different service characteristics.

I think the better model for Detroit is Vancouver.

Presumably before the Skytrain they had a good bus system. But the Expo Line was built in an empty rail ROW, so they definitely weren't upgrading an overcapacity bus route. And then the areas the route passes through were completely unremarkable. Single family houses, parks, a small shopping mall. Even New Westminster was tiny at the time.

They kept travel times low by having relatively long station spacing. The stations have good bus connectivity. The trains are automated, so the frequencies are high enough to make transferring from buses painless for riders of choice. You can't do this just by beefing up buses, this depends on the mode. The synergy with the buses improves the whole system. Then they changed land use to develop density nodes around the stations, which also doesn't happen only with buses.


But the thing is, Detroit to Royal Oak today is a better route than Vancouver to New Westminster was before the Expo Line. A full 1/3rd of the route passes through Downtown/Midtown/New Center. Royal Oak is bigger than New Westminster was. The areas in between have better TOD potential.

Then if you look at commuting patterns, there are basically two areas where downtown office workers live, and one of them is the area around Royal Oak, which is an area of 1 Mile grids that's perfectly suited towards bus routes that could very pleasantly collect people and transfer them to the rail line to get downtown, like in Vancouver. And then within the city of Detroit there are popular crosstown routes which are perpendicular to Woodward, and this would make those tremendously more useful.

And on top of that, the #2 and #3 employment centers in the region (Southfield and Troy) are also nearby Royal Oak, a straightforward expansion away. In that scenario a full half of the region's non-manufacturing jobs would be within 3 miles of the line and about 20% within 1 mile.

Building something like that and waiting 30 years for things to mature around the route, people would look back on it and think it was the obvious thing to do, just like in Vancouver, but from the present that's not the perspective that people have.



But I also really do think that the service quality has to be worth the investment. Streetcars are worse than buses in almost every way. Low end light rail service quality can be achieved much more cheaply with bus lanes. Even though these things are on-trend I don't think they really work most of the time. And the least trendy are monorails, but as a technology they make a lot of sense, and around the world there are several great monorail systems.

And for Detroit specifically, there are routes that most people here would say should be upgraded to rail, but I don't. I don't think Gratiot actually makes much sense as a route, beyond receiving good bus service. And then there are routes that no one talks about (people usually default to the spoke roads) which I think actually do make sense. Routes have to make sense, based on commuting patterns, capital costs, operating costs, how it interacts with the rest of the system, TOD potential, etc.