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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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