Tag: Buses Page 1 of 6

If you haven’t already, go and check out Parts 1 (Detroit) and 2 (Buffalo).

Niagara Falls USA by bus and foot

My Toronto friends have a habit of pulling a particular face when I deign to suggest making a trip to Niagara. It’s the exact same face that a certain kind of person (of which I confess to being one of) will give you if you mention a desire to visit the number one overcrowded tourist trap near their place.

If someone is visiting my neck of the woods I’ll probably dish out unsolicited advice that goes something like this…

“Bondi? Why? Bronte’s way nicer.”

“The Three Sisters? Well, up to you but definitely don’t go on the weekend.”

“The Hunter Valley? You mean Cessnock Heights!?” (jk who doesn’t love a wine region)

and for some Canadian flavour:

“Lake Louise? You know the Rockies is full of lakes that are just as epic and aren’t so popular you need to prebook a shuttle from the park and ride just to get there?”

So when I got this feedback on Niagara I could safely discount it as local’s bias and get on with planning my trip.

Niagara Falls, Canada or Niagara Falls, USA?

The first thing that will come up when you mention you are planning a trip to Niagara Falls is that the person who has been there before will tell you you simply must go to the Canadian side. I’m sure this bias is much stronger north of the border, but even tripadvisor seems to agree.

One thing I overheard, read online and was told countless times was that the all-important iconic view of the Falls is from Canada and that that is really the only side to see the Falls from.

I found the ambience of the Niagara Falls State Park on the U.S side of the border quite lovely, actually.

That was more than enough to send me gleefully rushing straight to the American side. After all, what’s more rustbelt than the more-rundown, less-loved version of an already tacky tourist attraction?

Transit from Buffalo to Niagara

Thanks, once again, to the general perception and approach of American transit agencies to being a safety net for the poor rather than a desirable means of transport competitive with the car, I was able to bag another brilliant transit deal: a $5 day pass within the Buffalo-Niagara region.

The price might be low but you pay for it in the system’s complexity.

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority runs buses in the Buffalo-Niagara area as well as Buffalo’s lone light rail line.

To get from Buffalo to Niagara Falls there are a couple of express options at various times of day, one of which goes to a suburban mall rather than Downtown Niagara. If in doubt, the hourly all-stops works well enough.

The NFTA network has a bit of spagetti energy and they don’t appear to publish a PDF network map. But they’ve given the public access to their network planning tool that not only shows route frequency and stop location but also includes some handy demographic data!

I rode the hourly 40 all-stops bus and it was decently popular. Riders were mostly locals using the intervening stops, but there was an Amish-looking father and son making their way to the Falls with a paper timetable in hand. I haven’t seen a paper timetable in years, but it will surprise absolutely no one that I used to have a not-insubstantial collection of Newcastle bus and train timetables to my name.

I’ve had a couple of conversations online with people who seem to think up to date route and timetable information at bus stops is basically pointless because ‘there’s an app for that’. This is frustrating to me because it comes from a place of assuming that everyone both wants and is able to be constantly connected. Is it really good policy for a public service to only provide information to people with a smartphone and an active internet connection?

It is a much smaller subsection of society that are unable to figure out when the next bus is coming from a simple paper timetable embedded in a bus stop and it doesn’t seem like that much to provide.

But I digress. As someone who mostly travels without mobile internet (“Could I also grab the wifi password?”) I must admit that our modern world is a trickier place to navigate sans internet than it once was. Few cities let you access their bikeshare programs without an active internet connection (shout out to a notable exception – Vancouver), getting a taxi now all but requires one and paper timetables are a thing of the past, or so I thought.

A pair of the many similarly dressed people I assume are Amish enjoying the view across the Niagara River to the more impressive Canadian-side skyline.

It was nice to see a father and son on a trip to enjoy an iconic national monument and a transit agency that understands the diverse needs of their constituency. I also enjoyed listening to a couple carrying cans of drink, an enormous plastic bag full of clothes and much else besides, give generous and probably too specific advice to the Amish duo. It was a wholesome American transit scene.

Arriving in Niagara Falls, USA

Stepping off in Niagara the joy continued. I was most surprised to see that the American side is beautiful in its own right and very, very popular. I had forgotten that the majority of US Americans don’t have passports and Niagara is an important nation-building pilgrimage! In fact, Buffalo was the first city in the world lit up by electricity thanks to Nikola Tesla’s brain (there is a statue of the man in each city, the Buffalo one is handily located right by the Downtown bus stop) and the incredible power of the Falls.

The Niagara Falls statue of Tesla. If you get on the bus to Niagara from Church and Main in Downtown Buffalo you can enjoy the Buffalo statue of Tesla while you wait.

Middle America was out in full force. Black, white, brown, Amish, you name it. The people watching rivalled the incredible majesty of the famous falls.

Happily settling for the second-class view of the Falls.

Hiking the Niagara Gorge

After ducking into a tourist information centre and being told it was “too far to walk” to the Niagara Power Vista I decided to take it upon myself to walk there. The Power Vista was about the only tourist attraction in the town that appealed to me – a museum to the city’s hydroelectric past, present and future housed in a functioning dam just north of the city. The dam was built by Robert Moses, who must’ve taken a well earned break from trying to ruin NYC with stroads and freeways to duck upstate and expand the role of hydro in the region.

For fans of awe inspiring natural beauty and post-industrial decay I cannot speak highly enough of this walk. Within minutes of leaving the Falls I was riding an elevator that was once part of a huge power station that had been destroyed by the water it was supposed to be harnessing. The river was fast flowing and devoid of watercraft, thanks to the enormous rapids downstream that limit access. I had been expecting to spend the day at what is functionally a carnival and instead had stumbled my way into a majestic gorge that played a momentous role in the industrial history of the United States.

The Niagara Gorge as seen from the lower levels of the abandoned Schoellkopf Power Station.

I took loads of photos (few other activities provoke this response), enjoyed the company of many birds and a couple of snakes, wandered about the graffiti-covered rusting relics and generally followed any distraction that grabbed my eyes. This unfortunately meant that I was running a bit tight to closing time of the Power Vista centre which, as described, was really far away.

At Devil’s Hole State Park I found this old freeway lane that had been cut off from the adjacent highway and turned into a bike lane that ran the last mile to the museum. As I got closer I realised that the museum footbridge across the freeway did not include access onto my bike/pedestrian road. I thought about jumping various fences but this is a huge, functioning hydroelectricity producing facility in America and I didn’t want to get shot. There I stood, mere metres from the museum but more than 2km away on foot. It was half an hour to close so I gave up and trudged back to the park to rest my weary feet and figure out how to get home.

Power for Ontario (left) and New York (right). That building on the right is the Niagara Power Vista. Sadly pedestrian access from this point is over 2km away…

To catch a bus you have to think like a bus.

Waiting at Devil’s Hole State Park for a bus poses a tricky situation if you don’t have access to the internet. The obvious solution would be to just buy a goddamn sim card (adding roaming to my Canadian sim was prohibitively expensive) but I’m going to set that solution aside because: 1, I don’t want to and 2, I personally think that a public transport system should be usable without one.

At Devil’s Hole State Park there are three bus stops for three different bus routes, none which have a printed timetable.

The first is a dinky tourist shuttle that runs back to Downtown and leaves from the car park (top left). This has no timetable so you can’t really plan ahead with it. Apparently it runs roughly every 40 minutes and you can track the buses on the app or in your browser, but I was wandering about roughly along its route all day and I can’t say I ever saw one…

I hate everything about this. Why even bother having wifi on your bus if the only way to find out when it’s coming is to look it up on the internet? Maybe get some wifi at your bus stops first, or, you know, run to a timetable!?

On the nearby street there are bus stops on either side for route 52. The 52 runs at an irregular frequency of anywhere between 30 and 120 minutes between services. The route is a big loop that takes 40 minutes to complete. This meant that whichever side I got a bus from it would be between 10 and 30 minutes to Downtown. I was vaguely aware of some of this (I had done a small amount of research before I wandered off downstream) so I knew that whichever side got a bus first, that was the one I wanted to be on.

The 52 ‘North End Circulator’ timetable makes for a brutal game of turn-up-and-go roulette.

I found myself a good spot on the grass where I could eye off all three bus stops and I waited. It took around 30 minutes until the more direct 52B came along, which, all things considered, I feel like worked out reasonably well. I swiped my day pass and headed back to Downtown Niagara Falls. Well, almost. The Portage Transit Centre where the 52B and other suburban bus routes terminate is awkwardly located at the edge of Downtown in a kind of run down supermarket carpark. So I had to walk the rest of the way to the trendy (for the area…) 3^rd Street to get some dinner. I was absolutely starving after all of this and thankfully all-you-can-eat Indian seems to be a trend in Niagara.

The smokey haze courtesy of the Quebec wildfires did downtown Niagara no favours in the picturesque stakes.

I left the restaurant stuffed like a turkey with some time to chill before my all-stops bus back to Buffalo. I had just started gently perambulating to aid my digestion when I spotted an unexpected express bus which I felt the need to awkwardly attempt to run for. I was back in Buffalo all of thirty minutes later extremely satisfied with the day’s undertakings – and I hadn’t even gone to the casino!

Carry on to the fourth and final part 4: the Erie Canal.

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Travelling by Transit across the Rustbelt – Part 2: Detroit to Buffalo

By Jed C

On August 18, 2023

In Travel

Suggested reading: Part One: Motor City.

The next scheduled stop on my trip was Syracuse in upstate New York. I wasn’t meeting my friend there for a few days so I had some time to make my way across leisurely.

Planning my trip East from Detroit I had the lyrics of Detroit or Buffalo looping around in my head:

Better pack up and go
Detroit or Buffalo
Anybody wanna know where, I don’t know
I don’t know
God knows everybody gotta go sometime
And I’m takin’ this train to the end of the line
Missin’ every mile that friend of mine

I wanted to take that train, if not to the end of the line than at least as far as Buffalo. I just didn’t feel like I’d be doing Barbara Keith justice boarding a Greyhound. That, I live in a (passenger) train-free area, and I don’t particularly enjoying short haul flying. So I wanted to use this trip as a chance to catch as many intercity trains as possible.

Unfortunately, heading East from Michigan is a huge blackhole in Amtrak’s often patchy coverage. It’s not as bad as Wyoming or South Dakota, but it’s pretty bad.

The Amtrak System Map. At this scale Southern Michigan looks like a train traveller’s delight! Source: wikimedia

Red are trains, green are buses. At this scale it’s clearer that all the trains in Michigan head West to Chicago. To head East on the Lakeshore you need to get to South Bend, Indiana or Toledo, Ohio. Source: Amtrak

I guess Ohio never forked out for some State-subsidised local Amtrak service like the Cascades in Washington and Oregon or the Wolverine in Michigan. This means that only long distance trains pass through Ohio and they are set up for travel across the State more than within in.

The busiest of these is the Lakeshore Limited. She is a flagship long distance passenger train, connecting what might just be America’s two most traditionally transit friendly cities, Chicago and New York (also Boston, the train splits at Albany with half heading South to NYC and the other half continuing East). Sadly, like most long distance Amtrak trains the Lakeshore only runs once a day. It also leaves Chicago at 9:30pm which I believe is designed to provide a direct connection with the Empire Builder and California Zephyr coming from the West. They arrive in Chicago midafternoon, so I guess Amtrak wants some leeway so it’s not refunding tickets and providing complimentary hotel beds left, right and centre.

This all means that the Lakeshore hits Toledo, Ohio at the travel-friendly time of 3:15am. It’s hard to justify taking a five and a half hour train trip when you know you’ll sleep or be totally zonked out the whole way and arrive at your destination not yet able to check-in but too tired to enjoy the sights and sounds.

That’s annoying, but still manageable. What makes this train basically uncatchable is that the Amtrak Thruway coach that connects from Detroit to Toledo inexplicably leaves Detroit at 9:30pm, arriving in Toledo at 10:35, a casual four and a half hours before the Lakeshore Limited is due. I have no idea why this is the case, and since the Amtrak station in Toledo is in a quiet, mostly industrial neighbourhood at the edge of downtown, that would be a long wait. Oh, and the Lakeshore runs late around half the time, earning it the clever nickname the “Lateshore Limited’.

So, I gritted my teeth, hit pause on Detroit or Buffalo and pressed play on Simon and Garfunkel’s America.

If I wasn’t so tight (and stubborn), for around 250 USDs there are multiple daily direct flights between the two cities. But I am (on both counts) and so I paid $70 for the pleasure of taking a series of crowded coaches to make the trip.

At 4:30pm, half an hour late, I boarded the bus from Detroit’s unloved Greyhound station bound for Cleveland. There I had an hour to attempt to find something to eat in the area that didn’t come from a vending machine, before jumping on a full Baron’s bus bound for Buffalo that pulled in at 11:30pm.

It was a long evening.

In Buffalo

Having spent plenty of time in Detroit but barely visited anywhere else in the Rustbelt I was labouring under the false impression that the faded glory of turn of the century America was best experienced in Detroit. How wrong I was. Buffalo’s downtown architecture was at least as epic, and they had the inspired idea to stick a light rail through the Downtown spine a good 40 years before the Q-Line was conceived.

Wide streets, tall buildings, homelessness: ‘merica!

Downtown Buffalo rejuvenation

I was only in Buffalo for a hot minute and was mainly there as a stopping off point for Niagara Falls. In the wanderings I did manage on my brief visit I was struck by two things:

1. Vibrant queer scene!

Buffalo has a bustling theatre scene and what appeared to be a very prominent queer scene as well. I think the fact that I rolled into town on the last night of Pride was probably a factor here but the bricks and mortar presence of gay spaces make it apparent this wasn’t just a one-off thing.

I mean come on people Buffalo’s nickname is the Queen City.

This one might be Pride specific. This is Main Street in the Theatre District. To the right of the frame is the portal where the Buffalo Metro stops activating Downtown’s retail core and heads underground for a quicker connection to the suburbs.

2. Attempts to ‘bring back Downtown’

So prior to this trip my thinking about urban blight and declining downtowns in the Rustbelt and beyond went something like this:

Early 20^th century: Streetcar suburbs, manufacturing boom, prosperous bustling downtown.
Mid century: Rise of the automobile, racial desegregation, growth of suburbia, freeway sprawl, loss of manufacturing jobs, decline of Downtown, abandoned buildings cleared for parking lots.
Late 20^th century: People realised suburbia is boring and diversity is good. Gentrification. Rise of Downtown as a cultural hub and desirable residential area with less of an emphasis as a commercial hub and very limited manufacturing (mainly just breweries).

In Buffalo I found out I was kinda right but I was missing a bit in the middle. What happened there (and I’m going to extrapolate and assume this was a general trend) was that when the decline began in the 1960s the city government put their heads together to figure out what they could do about it. This bit had always eluded me. I’d thought that once the Downtown starting to decline everyone just sort of shrugged and starting spending their time and money at suburban office parks and the new enclosed malls that sprung up on the edge of cities in the 1970s.

Being in Downtown Buffalo I realised that this was crazy. The architecture alone is staggering. City Hall looks like this:

The epic Buffalo City Hall completed in 1931 (eeep bad timing), the snazzy 2011 Federal Courthouse and an obelisk commemorating the assassination of President McKinley which took place in Buffalo in 1901. The City Hall is just as epic inside, but sadly the (free!) observation deck was closed on the day I went.

The amount of wealth and prestige Downtown must have been incredible. And of course, all those fancy bankers, industrials and city officials want a nice, bustling area next door to their office and steady demand for their various premises.

So Buffalo came up with an ambitious plan to fix Downtown. The idea was that since suburbia had sucked a lot of demand away, the existing area was too large and not what people wanted. Best to turn Downtown into the equivalent of a giant outdoor shopping mall. To do this all the activity would be funneled onto a single main street which would be partially enclosed and flanked by parking garages accessible directly from the freeway network. A new light rail would run up that main spine.

The bit I had never really considered is that all this ‘urban renewal’ was phenomenally expensive. It required a lot of expertise and money in an increasingly broke urban environment. The city had one shot to reinvent itself in the post-automobile world and the landscape we got is the legacy of that era in cities across the world, but most notably in the Rustbelt.

“The Regional Centre: A Comprehensive Plan for Downtown Buffalo” (1971) brought in all those ideas we know and hate: expansive ring freeways, abundant peripheral multistorey parking garages, a covered pedestrian mall, lots of full-block towers. A lot of this got built but what the planners didn’t count on is that if you cut off Downtown from the rest of the city like this there isn’t much incentive to build there or go there and so people don’t. THIS is why so many US cities have vacant lot car parks taking up entire city blocks. For years and years the demand for anything else to be built just hasn’t been there.

Downtown Buffalo today

Today Buffalo is a mix of incredible art-deco and late 19^th century architecture, a rather loud and imposing light rail that doesn’t run frequently enough and a very, very visible homeless population.

Whoever decided high floor streetcars with pop-out staircases on some carriages and at-grade boarding at a single door accessed through this edifice are a good idea needs to have a long hard think about what they’ve done.

Even the single street that the aforementioned 1970s renewal plan funneled all the retail into, Main Street, is too long for the amount of commercial demand. So while there are vibrant stretches of the street, particularly up in the Theatre district, there’s an awful lot of dead space around too and that’s just on the main street (Main Street). In more recent years cars have been reintroduced to some sections of the street in an attempt to bring back some life, even if it’s just people moving to and from their parked vehicles.

Like Detroit, I got the impression that Buffalonians love their city (more than the regular amount) and have continued their city’s legacy of punching about its weight culturally.

There’s no doubt Buffalo has a lot of problems, but all in all it’s the sort of city I’m kinda sad we don’t have in Australia. A place with a rich and vibrant arts and culture scene that isn’t an ‘alpha’ city with x millions of residents and sky-high rents. A place you can afford to live in a walkable neighbourhood that has interesting things going on.

Is that too much to ask?

Next up: Part 3: Niagara Falls, USA

One last thing before you go:

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Travelling by Transit across the Rustbelt – Part 1: Motor City

By Jed C

On July 16, 2023

In Travel

From one autocentric city to another

The closest commercial airport to my home is YYC – Calgary International Airport. Like everything else in Alberta (often called the Texas of Canada, which can be a complement or an insult, depending on context, usually the latter) it is a sprawling piece of infrastructure. Airport hotels are literal miles away from the terminal across a sea of freeways, empty fields and the ubiquitous parking lots.

Given the Albertan love of (read: unfortunate need for) the automobile it makes sense that in May this year Westjet (known in Calgary simply as ‘the airline’) launched a direct flight to Detroit, the world’s infamous Motor City.

Of course, being me, I had no intention of making use of either airport’s abundant long-term parking, car rental offices or even taxi ranks. Instead, I arrived at YYC on the 300, a rapid (limited stops) bus route that runs from Downtown, up Centre Street and then to the Airport every 30 minutes. It’s a decent service and only costs the standard Calgary bus fare of $3.75, although as is common in North America the driver doesn’t offer change and I was ill-prepared, so I stuffed a $5 note into the fare box and climbed aboard.

A photo of a bus stop. — The 300 leaves from Centre Street in Calgary’s very ’90s Chinatown. The whole area (and transit to the airport) will be getting a massive refresh when the C-train Green Line opens in 2027.

Calgary Airport has a transit surcharge!?

A weird aside about the 300 fare: there are two bus routes to Calgary airport, each running at 30 minute daytime frequency; the 100 to the local C-train station and the 300 to Downtown. If you board either bus bound for the airport you pay the standard flat fare for riding Calgary Transit – $3.75 including a 90 minute transfer.

BUT, if you are leaving from Calgary airport on the 300 to Downtown, the ticket vending machines at the airport seem to imply you are supposed to buy a special $12 airport ‘boarding pass’ ticket. Sadly I didn’t photograph the vending machine and there doesn’t appear to be any particularly current information about this online so I’m not 100% on what the deal is. But, I did find a PDF on the YYC website from 2011 that, aside from a few fare hikes, seems to reflect the current situation.

12 years out of date but aside from a $4 increase in fare I don’t think anything has changed. Sourced here.

I ended up boarding a 100 to the McKnight C-train because it came first (and to avoid potentially getting stung an extra 8 bucks by the driver) so I can’t confirm exactly how this works. Given that the 300 is pretty infrequent and the airport stop is outside, under an overpass with minimal signage, no next service display or basic amenities it is pretty rough to sting customers with a surcharge anyway.

But I guess that’s just, like, my opinion, man.

Touchdown Motor City

Landing at DTW (Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport) I wasn’t expecting too much. On previous visits to Detroit I’ve arrived at the Amshack and at the Rosa Parks Transit Centre (thank you Megabus) and both these places, while meeting the basic requirements you’d expect of arrival facilities, leave no doubt in your mind that the city (country?) has seen better days.

A photo of the Detroit Amtrack station — The Detroit Amshack. I’ll keep mentioning this because it is an absolute disgrace. Credit: Detroit Free Press

Arriving at DTW is a different kettle of fish. Detroit might have so famously declined through the latter half of the 20^th century, but the greater Detroit metro region has always been just fine, thankyou very much. The airport is the 20^th largest in the country, moving some 28 million people last year.

Befitting the Motor City it will come as no surprise that, like Calgary, there is no rail based transit from the airport. There’s a cute little train running between the terminals, because weirdly cute little trains within airports (or theme parks or between casinos) don’t seem to offend Americans like the real kind.

Good news though, since 2018 the airport isn’t completely cut off from any kind of public transport. The 261 Michigan Ave FAST bus is a rapid route that runs from the airport all the way Downtown. I was keen to give it a try.

Finding the bus stop proved more difficult than I had anticipated

Now leaving this major airport there are signs that direct you towards ‘Ground Transportation’ with a little pictogram of a taxi and a bus. Knowing that there is no rail transit to the airport I figured this would direct me where I needed to go.

Instead, it took me into a multi-storey parking garage that also included a layover area for coaches and shuttles heading to hotels and more, further afield parking lots. Any sort of local transit type bus stop was conspicuously absent, so I headed back into the terminal and found a sign that directed me to the City Bus stop. That was good but then the next overheard sign didn’t mention it at all, so I asked a helpful information guy who directed me to the furthest section of the car drop off area. Here, the stop was marked by a simple bus stop sign like you’d expect to find on a forgotten suburban corner; no timetable, no frequency information, no nothing.

A photo of what appears to be a car pick up/drop off area outside an airport terminal but is actually a bus stop. — This is the bus stop at Detroit airport. Note the temporary signs on concrete blocks (hey, it’s only been open for 5 years, give them a break) and the multiple cars using the bus stop as a drop off area. When my bus did come and I had to pick my way between them!

And, as you’d expect from such an unmarkable strip of roadway, the people going about their business dropping off their loved ones/uber fares at the airport paid no heed to where the bus stop ended and their designated drop off area began.

This meant that when my bus did show after just 5 minutes of waiting (a lucky break, they run at 30 minute headways) the driver just kinda pulled up in the middle lane and glanced over to where I was sitting. I jumped up and squeezed past the parked cars and idling shuttle buses to climb aboard. As soon as I had paid my $2 the doors swung shut and off we drove; the driver and me. As we sped onto the flyover that led out of the airport I couldn’t quite believe that of all those people pouring out of the place in 30 entire minutes I was the only person that was taking the practically free bus Downtown.

I assume everyone else had got taxis or hired cars, but surely some of them would have appreciated knowing this perfectly decent service existed. Perhaps some functional signage or, you know, a timetable would help here.

Riding the 261 Michigan Avenue FAST

The 261 stopped about every mile or two down Michigan Avenue at major crossroads and shopping districts, although the first half of that journey is pretty much the Detroit of popular imagination. This area isn’t actually in the city proper, but it consisted of mostly vacant lots, cheap motels and run-down gas stations.

A photo of the inside of a bus — Until we got to Michigan Ave the 261 was my own private ride. Props to SMART on the info display. Clear, accurate info and estimated travel times along the route. It’s amazing how few cities outside of East Asia and Europe can pull this off. At $2 I declare this bus to be a certified DEAL.

Once the bus got to Dearborn things out the window started to improve. There’s a tarted up new bus interchange at the Dearborn Amtrak station which is definitely better than the much larger Detroit’s train station. The bus passed through a bustling Arabic neighbourhood and some more gentrified and prosperous looking suburbs before driving by the grand old Michigan Station (more on that later) and reaching the Rosa Parks Transit Centre downtown without event.

Well, excepting the guy who stood up from the back seat of the bus and announced to us all that he was having a hard time and could someone please spare a cigarette.

The infamous Detroit Downtown

I’ve visited Detroit three times; in 2013, 2015 and 2023.

This time I was blown away by the changes happening downtown. A hipster-ish coffee shop I had visited in 2013 had seemed at the time to be in a bizarre location, surrounded by abandoned buildings and bleak multi-storey parking garages, is now next to a pedestrianised arcade and surrounded by other coffee shops, grocers and small bars.

The city’s main North/South thoroughfare, Woodward Street, now has its own streetcar (more on that shortly) and as it runs past the Fox and Filimore theatres with their neon lights and art deco stylings you’d be forgiven for momentarily thinking you were in New York, San Francisco or Chicago.

A photo of downtown Detroit at night. — Detroit: a city on the grow! (Please ignore People Mover in foreground)

The architecture in Detroit is as good as, or better than, anything those three cities have to offer and as the gaps between the buildings slowly fill in with surprisingly well considered and thoughtfully designed new buildings, a new iteration of one of America’s great downtowns is being born.

The Q-Line

The Woodward Streetcar, inexplicably known as the Q-Line, is typical of some of the many problems that plague transit in U.S American cities.

At some point in the early 2000s it became widely acknowledged that the whole all-in on the car thing wasn’t really working out. Young and upwardly mobile people actually wanted to live in a city with transit, safe cycling and some basic pedestrian amenity. In most of the world this would be considered reasonable, but it was a shock to the governments of American cities that has spent the preceding 50 years removing any last remaining vestiges of these things and replacing them with (you guessed it!) more car lanes.

So, around the same time in the 2010s a whole bunch of cities decided to build new light rail downtown. The general idea being to link the gentrifying hipster neighbourhoods on the city fringe to the downtown core. The idea is decent (trams = European vibes) but the execution came up against two very frustrating road blocks that make these systems generally pretty shitty.

A photo of the Q Line in Downtown Detroit — Apparently I didn’t take any photos of the Q-Line so here’s one from wikipedia. Credit: Bluediamond616

The Detroit Q-Line handily exhibits both characteristics!

Problem 1: No right of way

Thanks to the aforementioned planning decisions of the past 6 decades Detroit has an abundance of road lanes downtown. It is the Motor City after all.

Woodward, the thoroughfare on which the Q-Line runs, is 6 or more lanes wide for most of its length. It is mainly used for local traffic as it has not one, but two, 6-lane freeways paralleling its route within a mile of the road. ‘Merica.

An aerial photo of the Woodward corridor Q Line route — Yellow are 6 lane freeways, Red is the length of the Q-Line on Woodward. There is literally no reason for through traffic to use Woodward. Source: Google Earth.

The whole point of the Q-Line was to rejuvenate the Woodward corridor and they have honestly done a great job of that side of things. But how, given all these available lanes, the city couldn’t bring themselves to spare just TWO for the streetcar is beyond me.

In the 1940s streetcars ran down Woodward on convenient median tracks. 80 years later and this kind of smart design rarely occurs in American cities. Source: US Library of Congress

Yes, the Q-Line runs in mixed traffic which is a disaster for its reliability and a frustration for its many users. On Game Day (there are three enormous stadiums right next to Q-Line stops but the Game Day I witnessed was in fact the Detroit Grand Prix) the traffic jams would completely break the system, so staff are out there early dropping traffic cones to create temporary tram-only-lanes on Woodward and shouting at idling vehicles to keep the claimed lanes free of traffic.

This approach is so unbelievably American I couldn’t quite believe it was happening. Instead of just installing the tram in its own median right of way and narrowing Woodward to two lanes each direction (which would help with the whole urban renewal thing anyway) the tram runs in mixed traffic until the road is so busy with cars that it can’t, and then a whole bunch of workers get out there and manually build a temporary right-of-way. Staggeringly inefficient but there’s no denying it’s a cultural experience.

Problem 2: Rubbish frequency

The Q-line is supposed to be a ‘turn up and go’ style service. There are a few things holding it back from this. The first is the mixed traffic making it way too unreliable for its short length. The second is that the next service displays are not particularly accurate, I suspect in part because of the first.

The third thing is frequency. When I used the Q-Line it was running between 15 and 30 minute frequencies. I would turn up ready to go and if I couldn’t see the tram in the distance I’d just walk. Pretty much every vehicle I got on was standing room only.

Given that the Q-Line is the centrepiece of Detroit’s transit system (sorry People Mover) 10 minutes all day every day is not too much to ask.

The frequency issue is pretty easy to fix: more trams, more drivers. Sadly the mixed traffic issue is a lot harder because to put the Q-Line in its own lanes now would require more or less rebuilding the line from scratch. Sigh.

An aerial image of a small section of the Q line in Downtown — If you thought it would be easy to convert the Q-Line route into it’s own right of way you are sadly wrong. Look at how the tracks wind amongst the mixed traffic lanes. What even is that? Source: Google Earth.

Gentrification doesn’t have to be a dirty word

The areas I’ve talked about are pretty confined in the scheme of things: Downtown, Midtown, Corktown. Outside of a few inner city neighbourhoods a lot of Detroit is much as it’s been for a long time. Vacant lots, run down houses, a lack of quality supermarkets or decent places to eat. But the same can be said for huge swathes of the Rust Belt and lots of places besides.

I’m sure there are some people in Detroit as everywhere else who, for a lot of good reasons, are worried about their neighbhourhoods changing.

The reason why gentrification is different in Detroit is that there are so many neighbourhoods that are made up predominately of vacant lots and abandoned buildings. It seems from my few conversations that most people are glad to see life being breathed back into some of these areas.

A photo of a construction site and surrounding buildings near Downtown Detroit — Beautiful old buildings are being lovingly restored and new entertainment facilities and mixed use developments are springing up in the hipster-belt neighbourhoods on the fringe of Downtown.

What’s even cooler to see is that architecturally and from a planning standpoint these don’t appear to be bland, cookie-cutter, poorly executed developments. Detroiters love their city, and it is apparent that those working on the new built environment feel the same way.

Michigan Central Station

I said I’d come back to Michigan Central Station. If you don’t know too much about Detroit (and you’re reading my blog…) it’s probably the one building you recognise. In a country dotted with incredible architecture from the railway boom of the late 19^th century Michigan Central might just be the grandest dame of them all.

Opened in 1914 as the tallest railway station in the world the building defines the Corktown skyline. As the railways declined in the postwar period so too did the station, reaching its nadir in 1988 when Amtrack sold the building and relocated their service to the aforementioned Amshack in Midtown.

Repair and rebuilding have been ongoing for about 10 years and it’s belonged to the Ford company, another Detroit icon, since 2018. It’s still wrapped in cyclone fencing but eventually the station will be reopened as a retail and office destination surrounded by a newly upgraded park.

Hopefully at some point in my lifetime the station will once again be a hub on the line between Chicago and Toronto. Perhaps one day we will be able to arrive in, and leave, the Motor City in the style that begets a city with as much of it as Detroit. Forget the Amshack, forget the Greyhound Station, forget the distant surburban airport and forget the grey concrete freeways dotted with ads for marijuana dispensaries and civil lawyers. Detroit’s on the way back, baby.*

*Detroit never left.

Up next…

This is part one of what I think will be a four part series on my transit based travels across the Rustbelt this (North American) summer.

Carry on with Part 2: Detroit to Buffalo.

Also note:

Web 2.0 (that’s the one with the social media, right?) appears to be in the process of fracturing into a million tiny pieces. Since it’s much harder to share through social media than it was, I’ve decided to set up a simple mailing list! Sign up and get emailed when I blog. My average seems to be every 3 to 6 months so you won’t be spammed.

If you do want to connect on social media I’ve more or less abandoned my facebook and twitter accounts so come find me on mastodon.