Week Six Blog

It’s going to be a short blog this week because I didn’t spend as much time fully engaging with things this week. Again, I’ll just talk a little bit about Detroit in general and specifically its lack of good transit.

I can’t speak to the buses, but as someone who has taken the Q-line many times to go downtown, it’s extremely useful. Before I complain about other deficits in the city’s infrastructure, I must give credit to its tram system connecting downtown to midtown. It is not perfect, but it has frequency, operates when I want to go downtown, and has a host of interesting people to observe when making my journeys. However, the praise stops there. For every time the Q is perfectly on time, there’s another wait of 50 minutes. For each meter that the Q takes me downtown, there’s a lack of transportation going anywhere except the one line down Woodward. Surely the people mover would be useful? It would, if it went anywhere except a loop to connect the financial buildings of downtown. In the time it would take for the people mover to get to a station and take me a few blocks away, I likely could have walked to my destination. It simply is not expansive enough to justify its use. Similarly, the Q only connects Downtown to Midtown, a small part of the city, via one way. If you’re in the other parts of the city, almost all of which lack a connection to the Q line, it’s pointless to care about it. What Detroit needs, and what it should have had, being once a city of over two million people, is a proper transit system: a subway, trolley buses, and discouragement of cars to encourage the use of said system. Of course, this never materialized (the fact Detroit was, and in many ways still is, the center of the U.S car industry likely plays a role). Efforts to build it have stalled, and efforts to expand the existing network have run into a predictable barrier which killed light rail in my own home-city: a fear of poor people.

Virginia Beach approved a proposal to extend Norfolk’s light rail system from their downtown to our commercial district and, from there, to our tourist-filled Ocean Front. The extension, if it had ever been built and made efficient, would have likely connected the two cities in ways which could have discouraged car use (countless trips are made along the highway connecting our cities in a 25 minute trip). Despite the approval of VB voters in an earlier referendum, the measure to actually put the plan into action, voted on in 2016, failed with a resounding majority against it. It’s difficult to find reasons why online, but everyone knew why the city resisted expanding the light rail: it would supposedly make it easier for the homeless (and less blatantly, the “poor”) to travel to the “great commercial districts” of Virginia Beach. The same is true of the Q. While it was originally slated to extend far out from downtown to outlying suburbs and neighborhoods of single-family houses, the corporations, funding the project, and the city canceled this ambitious goal. Instead, they decided to end the Q in midtown, a university district and rising affluent neighborhood. The reason, argued in as subtle a manner as Virginia Beach’s rejection of light rail, was that it would bring in unscrupulous people from poorer parts of the city to the fast gentrifying downtown. The result is a failure of Detroit’s transit to be equitable for everyone.