Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
Is expressway congestion in metro Detroit really nonexistent?
I wouldn't know, but I'd much rather hear from someone who, ya know, actually lives there.
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It's not as congested as other cities, but in recent years I've found I-94 between downtown and the airport to be annoyingly congested while I'm trying to catch a flight. When a commuter rail does materialize, the connection between downtown and the airport will likely be the priority.
There are a couple of proposals for how to revive commuter rail service. One is to use the tracks that currently support Amtrak's Wolverine line to have an hourly commuter service between Ann Arbor and the Amtrak station in Detroit's New Center area. The state would build a station in Wayne (I think) and airport passengers would take a shuttle from there to the terminals.
Another proposal is to revive the commuter service between Toledo and Detroit via DTW. This one actually started out as Toledo's idea, to create a service between Toledo and DTW. However, the tracks that would be used for the Toledo proposal are the ones that lead to Michigan Central Station. I read that somewhere recently that in order for this to happen, about a mile of tracks would need to be rebuilt leading into the actual station terminal at MCS, but otherwise the track are there. They'd also need to build the stations at DTW and Toledo. But the bottom line is that there wouldn't need to be a lot of rail construction or right-of-ways built to run a commuter rail service.
The discussion about congestion in Detroit always conveniently omits the fact that the reason there is not a lot of congestion is because the region has dedicated close to 100% of its transit infrastructure spending for the past 5 decades to road expansion. Detroit used to have terrible traffic.