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: wikimediaRed 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.
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.
Good vibes.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 20th 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 20th 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 19th 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.
Sorry ’bout it.
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.
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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.
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.
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 20th century, but the greater Detroit metro region has always been just fine, thankyou very much. The airport is the 20th 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 19th century Michigan Central might just be the grandest dame of them all.
Michigan Central under redevelopment. Credit: Costar
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.
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.
It’s been almost a year since I last posted here, but my excuse is a good one. I’ve been flat out wrapping up Following the Flow, the documentary I’ve been producing for the past three years. You can watch the trailer and find out more on our website. We are also showing on SBS this Sunday September 25th at 4pm to celebrate World Rivers Day. If you missed that you might still be able to catch it OnDemand!
OK now to Marseille.
Spending a week in Marseille, on France’s Mediterranean Cote d’Azur, I couldn’t help but find myself constantly comparing its public transport and urban fabric with that of Sydney. Aside from the fact that I happened to find myself there, I think these two cities have some similarities that make such a comparison worthwhile.
Marseille as an administrative area has the 2nd largest population of any French city, around 900,000 people. The greater ‘Metro Marseille’ region has a population of around 1.9m people spread across 4,000 square kilometres, making it the 3rd most populous metro area in France after Paris and Lyon.
Marseille’s Vieux Port neighbourhood. Being a tourist, I spent a fair bit of time around here. Credit: Tia Monto
Greater Sydney, for comparison, as described by the Australian Bureau of Statistics spans some 12,000 square kilometres reaching from Bargo in the South, Blackheath in the West and as far as Wyong Shire in the North. Personally I would’ve drawn the boundaries a little closer in. This area is home to around 5.2 million people; Australia’s most populous metropolitan area (but perhaps not for much longer!).
At first glance these cities might appear to be on completely different scales, but the relative density of French cities (and also that of the inner and middle suburbs of Sydney), as well as the countless other significant urban agglomerations within a 1-2 hour commute of Marseille probably makes the size and makeup of these cities more similar than they first appear.
Comparing Sydney to Paris in this way would be less useful as Paris is on an altogether different scale with 13m people spread over 19,000 square kilometres. The vast bulk of them, 11 million, living in the 2,000 square kilometre urban area. Density and total size wise, Sydney has more in common with Marseille than Paris. Besides, I didn’t go to Paris so I can’t exactly write about it!
Metro
Until 2019 Sydney didn’t have a metro. This is more a quirk of definition than anything else. From a tourist or resident’s perspective much of the Sydney Trains network effectively functions as a metro. It is sometimes described as a mix between a European metro and suburban railway (or S-bahn in the Germanosphere).
Marseille built a more traditional metro system in the late 1970s and it now consists of 2 lines running short 4 car rubber tyred and driver operated trains.
A metro train pulling into Castellane Station on Line 1.
The scale of the system is pretty modest with 31 stations spread across 23km. Note the typically high European station density with an average of a station every 750m.
I really like the sleek simplicity of the over door map on-board the Marseille Metro.
Sydney’s Metro, as I’ve expressed elsewhere, is a different beast entirely. Using longer 6 car driverless trains in two years time it will span 65km from Tallawong to Bankstown, coincidently with the same number of stations as Marseille’s system: 31. In Sydney that’s a station on average every 2.1km.
I discussed the problem with the density of stations on Sydney’s Metro in detail in the context of the CBD and Southwest Metro and also in regard to Metro West. In short, there’s nothing inherently wrong with widely stopped stations but it does mean that more people are going to need to use another mode of transport to actually get there. It changes the dynamic of what a metro does. In Marseille, metro stations are close enough together that if you live anywhere near a metro line and are able, you can comfortably walk there.
Louis says ‘Sortie thataway —>!’
Tram
Like Sydney, Marseille has 3 tram lines – and two of them share a significant amount of track in the CBD. In fact, their network diagrams have a lot in common!
The Marseille tramway serves 32 stations across 16km of route while Sydney’s light rail serves 42 stops across a 25km system.
There’s some definitely network similarities going on here…
Next year, with the opening of the Parramatta Light Rail, Sydney’s major satellite city will feature it’s own modest tram system. So too, since 2014, has Aubagne, 20 minutes by train from Marseille’s main station, had its own 7 stop tram system.
In the urban core of Marseille the tram typically runs in streets that have had car traffic completely removed, so too with George Street in Sydney.
Rue de Rome is for trams, bikes and people.
In both cities as the tram leaves the CBD it tends to run in a median or kerb right of way next to mixed traffic lanes and in both cities there are some short sections of tunnel. Sydney’s L1 is a bit of an outlier here running along an old freight corridor.
One key difference in the systems when considering the urban fabric more broadly is the length of the trams. Thanks to some weird wrangling with the RMS, Sydney’s L2 and L3 are serviced by coupled pairs of Alstom trams totalling 67m long – enormous in an urban environment. This was essentially done to increase the total capacity of the line without increasing service frequency – ostensibly to avoid delaying motorists at busy intersections along the route.
The trams in Marseille are a more conventional 42.5m long.
People, trams and outdoor dining. Rue de Rome has some serious George Street vibes.
It turns out the similarity of the two systems goes way back. In 1876 Marseille opened its first horse drawn tramway. In 1899, its first electric tram. The system was slowly dismantled and replaced with buses and trolley buses starting in 1945 and finishing in 1960. Only one 3km line remained in operation through this period. The first service in the modern network ran in 2007, 47 years after the old system’s almost total closure.
For comparison, Sydney’s first horse drawn tramway began service in 1861 and its first electric tram in 1898. Sydney’s tramways began to be dismantled in the 1950s to be replaced by buses, a process that wound up in 1961. The first stage of Sydney’s current light rail network opened up in 1997, 36 years later.
Evidently the processes that drove the demise of Sydney’s tramways played out the world over.
Buses
Fixed line transport (trains, metro, trams) are the friend of the tourist. It’s easy to figure out where they go, typically straightforward to acquire tickets and you usually don’t have to press the button or pull the cord to alight. Buses offer a more varied experience and in many cities they are totally impenetrable to visitors.
In this regard Marseille is a revelation. Cash payment is accepted on board (2 euro for a 1 hour any mode transfer ticket), almost every stop has a shelter featuring a network map, timetable and often a live next-service display, every stop has an easy to remember name and, best of all, on-board displays that actually work let you know where the bus is and what stop is upcoming – plus you can see where to transfer to other routes, trams and metro. Can you tell I’m a big fan?
This is actually a tram stop, but the info at bus stops was just as comprehensive.
There are some downsides: the system is extremely popular and not frequent enough. Bus overcrowding is severe more often than not. Fare evasion seems rife, although periodic tickets weren’t particularly expensive so maybe a lot of people have annual passes and just don’t need to tap on. We were waved onto buses on multiple occasions without paying for some reason or other. The buses mostly operated in mixed traffic though I have to say, despite the narrow roads and haphazard parking, traffic never seemed to be too bad. I’ve definitely been stuck in a lot worse bus traffic in Sydney. This could be a bias of the routes I was travelling on, maybe things are worse in commuter neighbourhoods.
A short wheelbase bus plying a narrow road in the old part of town. Note the bollards in the foreground to stop cars blocking the footpath and a car (legally) parked obstructing the footpath on the far side.
As in Sydney, rear door boarding is discouraged by signage, but unlike in Sydney it often happens anyway, particularly when there are a lot of people trying to get onto an already crowded bus. Despite the crowding I didn’t ever see a bus driver not let someone on (although a few passengers elected to wait rather than scrum their way on) and only once did our driver completely skip a stop with waiting passengers. As opposed to Sydney it seems like the onus of safety falls more on the passengers than the driver.
Onboard displays showing accurate next stop information are on every bus and they actually work! It reminded me of the time when Sydney Buses started having these circa 2005, but they were either always off, showed static or ran ads…not so useful!
Another funny similarity with Sydney is the existence of a B1, although Marseille has a B2, B3A and B3B as well. Like in Sydney the B1 signifier meant an important and frequent route. The Marseille B1 runs from a downtown Metro station out to an isolated university campus and seemed to operate in a mix of bus-only lanes and mixed traffic. Also like the Sydney B1 the Marseille B1 has its own vehicles, articulated buses instead of double deckers. Sadly I didn’t manage a photo of one.
Ticketing
Buying a ticket from the machines at metro stations (and some tram stops) is extremely straightforward. Just click on the photo of the British flag to swap it into English and select the duration of your ticket. 1 hour starts at 2 euro, 24 hours is 5.20 and as far as I’m aware you can go as high as an annual ticket. Options!
Buying the ticket on the bus is a little bit trickier, without French I’m not sure if the whole gamut of tickets was available onboard but we had no trouble buying 1 hour tickets from the driver.
Contrast to Sydney where we lack time based fares which, despite some shortcomings, are very, very tourist friendly. On the plus side all opal services (pretty much all services) allow tap on/off with a credit card which is obscenely tourist friendly – at least if you aren’t price sensitive and have a credit card! The flip side of that is that paying cash fares is all but impossible in Sydney and to do so you’d have to figure out that you need to go to a convenience store and buy an opal card with cash there – tricky!
Suburban Trains
I didn’t take any suburban trains in Marseille so I’m going to refrain from commenting on them but I’m fairly sure they exist in some capacity.
Intercity Trains
Marseille St Charles is a terminus station along the same lines as the ‘Sydney Terminal’ intercity platforms at Central. From here high speed ‘TGV’ trains, express ‘Intercitie’ trains and local/regional ‘TER’ trains extend out across Provance, France and even to a handful of international destinations.
Figuring out which trains require pre-purchased tickets and how to nab the best fare isn’t super easy, but compared to schlepping to an airport, travelling through French stations is a breeze. In the past few weeks I’ve taken all 3 kinds of trains a bunch of times and as anyone who has trained around Europe can attest, the whole thing works remarkably well.
Marseille St Charles is at a junction point of the 2 Metro lines making it an easy connection to the rest of the city.
Sydney’s Central Station has roughly hourly departures on what are now called NSW Trainlink Intercity services – the equivalent of French TER trains – in 3 directions: North to Newcastle, South to Wollongong and West to the Blue Mountains. Our NSW Trainlink XPT and Xplorer trains are roughly equivalent to the French Intercitie trains, offering First and Second Class seats and requiring a reservation to travel. The frequency from Sydney is much lower than Marseille as you might expect and there is sadly no antipodean analogue for the French TGV.
Seaport
Getting a bit off topic from the realm of urban transport here but there’s an interesting comparison to be made between the two cities’ harbours. Both Sydney and Marseille have beautiful old harbours surrounded by historic architecture, luxury hotels and tourist orientated attractions. In both cities huge new container terminals have been built away from the old harbours, taking the necessary nuisance of global trade away from the panoramic views of the old port and freeing up much needed space for parking luxury yachts.
Both cities are both well and truly on cruise ship itineraries although Marseille is notable for also being a hub for enormous ferries that connect the French mainland with Corsica and also across to old colonial possessions in Algeria and Tunisia.
Sydney’s last ocean going long distance ferry left some 15 years ago when the Spirit of Tasmania axed their Sydney-bound service.
Urban fabric
Marseille has been continuously occupied since 600BC when it was founded from the sea. Culturally the city seems to be just as connected across the Mediterranean as it is to the French mainland.
Because of this long and varied history, much of the city was built well before automobiles were a consideration. On the positive side, the human scale of so much of the city is a pleasure to explore. On the negative side, people have surely asserted cars into this environment in which they don’t really fit and it is basically a clusterfuck.
In the more commercially orientated parts of the city bollards do the heavy lifting of stopping cars obstructing footpaths. In older and wealthier residential neighbourhoods cars are EVERYWHERE. They’re parked blocking the tiny footpaths and they’re parked partially obstructing intersections. The only saving grace is that thankfully the disease of the ever larger all American vehicle is (mostly) yet to infect Europe, so most cars are 2 door hatches or the size of a Mazda 3. Ten years ago this was true of Sydney, alas no longer.
The surest way to keep cars out of a street is with bollards, just ask the French.
Pedestrian environment
Given all the things I’ve outlined so far you won’t be surprised to hear that being on foot in Marseille is a mixed bag. Neighbourhoods are so dense that if you walk for an hour across the city you will without doubt encounter many interesting goings-on. This really makes it the perfect city to visit as a tourist.
In the Old Port and other central areas pedestrian amenity is amazing. Large boulevards and plazas are given over to people and restaurants and bars spill out into these enormously popular public spaces.
A typical street in the Vieux Port neighbourhood of Marseille.
This trend caught my eye as in much of Australia if a business wants to occupy part of the footpath they need a permit and they’re up against other footpath users for that right. All sorts of people require access to the footpath so in some respects it isn’t an ideal place to sprawl a commercial undertaking. But it’s a shame that like so many debates in Australia, this conversation pits different groups that want to use our (relatively wide) streets for anything that isn’t moving and storing cars against one another.
More Vieux Port. Contraflow bike lanes are pretty common and help make the city heaps more accessible on bike than it is in a car. They also make streets busier and less predictable which encourages people to drive more carefully and go slower. The speed limit here is either 20 or 30, but you’d be hard pressed (safely) going any faster than that anyway.
It’s wonderful to see a city that has reclaimed so much streetspace that a restaurant’s 20 outdoor tables can coexist with street vendors, people sitting around or waiting for the tram, people whizzing by on e-scooters and walkers of all speeds, ages and mobilities.
Micromobility
I spent my week in Marseille telling anyone who would listen (read: my friends) that the micromobility revolution was underway! It was exciting to see and not just when we doubled up on hirable e-scooters for the post-midnight run home one night.
E-scooters and e-bikes with buzzy one syllable names and distinctive colour schemes hang around on street corners, in plazas and occasionally en masse in designated storage areas. Unlike in Sydney, they are extremely popular. When your correspondent went to hire one (well not me actually, I didn’t have the requisite internet to download the app with) the first 5 or so we checked were all out of battery. On several occasions I saw people contracting to these international tech companies out there moving the scooters around and replacing their batteries.
There are millions more of these things about, but I’m not much of a photographer…
But it isn’t just the start-ups making this type of mobility seem like a bigger deal. Personal e-scooters and e-bikes seem to be just as common as the humble pushie in Marseille. The great thing is that because of the flexible use of public space for transport, the city is ready for it.
In Sydney we like to carefully delineate roadspace for specific uses. This means that the roads work very well for cars, okay for buses and pedestrians and quite poorly for cyclists. They aren’t really welcome on the footpath or the road.
In Marseille on the other hand, except in the parts of the city where cars are explicitly excluded, the road is for everyone. Pedestrians (old and young), cars, buses, motorbikes, pushbikes, scooters, wheelchairs, whatever. This definitely isn’t ideal, particularly for wheelchair users and the less mobile who have to navigate this treacherous landscape, but it does mean that when something that has the potential to totally change how we get around cities for the better comes along, society doesn’t freak out. E-scooters? No worries, I already have to dodge the motorised variety!
The pedestrian environment can be pretty hostile in Marseille, but at least you aren’t about to get run over by a 3 tonne ute!
Instead of waging war on e-scooters, as we are in Sydney, they are being embraced by the Marseillaise like no doubt so many other changes over the 2600 years they’ve been there.
Lessons for Sydney
This post is much longer than I intended (I never have been one for brevity) and I’m aware that I’m a transport and planning enthusiast who spent a grand total of eight nights in a foreign city. My insights might be interesting but they probably aren’t profound.
That said, I did want to end on a sort of summary of some of the transport/urban design wins from Marseille that Sydney could relatively easily adopt and a couple of other thoughts that comparing the two cities brought up for me.
We need to start taking steps to limit the growth in size of passenger vehicles in Australia immediately. Marseille is car strewn, but it works(ish) because the cars are at least relatively compact. If we replaced all of them with Ford Rangers and SUVs the streets would be so cluttered that no one else, be they on foot or driving a bus, could get passed and the consequences would be deadly. In 99% of cases there is no need for people to drive such large vehicles, they do because it’s convenient, comfortable and you can. Our cities and states can take steps to stop this trend because we know where it leads: just take a look across the Pacific (from Sydney!) or the Atlantic (from Marseille!)
We need to urgently build a network of dedicated micromobility lanes and low speed shared streets. In Sydney the roads belong to cars. That isn’t going to change anytime soon. People want to get out of cars for health reasons and because it’s more fun, cheaper and often faster. But we need safe spaces to encourage that. That means building a lot more dedicated bike/micromobility lanes that are wide enough for all kinds of users; I’m looking at you old guy going 30km/h down the footpath in your electric wheelchair. These lanes need to actually connect all the way to where someone wants to go. Enough with the piecemeal bike lanes that get tacked on when there’s spare space in the roadway. Enough with the chevrons and green paint on a 6 lane highway and calling it bike infrastructure. We need lanes that are separated from traffic or we need 30km/h maximum speed limits and streets that are designed to make going any faster than this completely unviable (see: the backstreets of Newtown).
Frequency is freedom. If you are reliably running your public transport service at a minimum 10 minute frequency all day and into the evening people will use it. We need to stop freaking out about travel time in every conversation about improving transit in Sydney (which cost us several really useful infill stations on Metro West) and start making as many of our trains, trams, ferries, buses and metro as frequent as possible for as long as possible. This is already well underway.
We can and should reclaim as much of the roadway from cars as possible. The standard street in Sydney is one chain wide, that’s just over 20 metres. In so much of the city that means 2 lanes of traffic, 2 lanes of parked cars and maybe 2m on either side for a footpath, trees, bins, cafe seating, bus stops, utility boxes and everything else. We need to take what’s been going on in the city and spread it to our inner suburbs by reducing the number of vehicle lanes, reducing the number of on-street parking spaces and creating more space for all the stuff that is currently crammed onto the footpath. I’m sure it seemed like a huge ask in Marseille and it definitely ruffled a few feathers when George Street was pedestrianised but in both instances no one is looking back. It’s just so much better now for everyone.
