
After 61 Years, Detroit Gets a Streetcar Once More - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/12/528190480/after-61-years-detroit-gets-a-streetcar-once-more
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michaelflux
After having lived in metro Detroit for 16 years prior to moving in 2013,
while a part of me thinks it's nice in a "better than nothing" sense, the more
realistic part sees this as nothing more than a nice press release which, at
the end of the day won't actually do anything for the city.

At the end of the day Detroit is a city which was designed from the ground up
to discourage public transport. Combine that with the lack of any sort of a
population within walking distance of the Q Line and the line neither going or
connecting to anything meaningful, the lack of expansion plans and at the end
of the day you just have a shiny train to put in a press release that won't
even see enough ridership to even come close to covering it's own cost.

Have a look at the cover photo in this article - Woodward is the centre right
road in that image.
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunda...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/exposures-
detroit-by-air-alex-maclean.html) \- This is the road along which the Q Line
is travelling. I think you can see exactly how much ridership one can
reasonably expect.

~~~
jarboot
The same is happening in Milwaukee. [1]

...and I'm not sure why they're doing stuff like this instead of aiding the
ailing north side? We already have buses and could pump money into something
much more important. We have much bigger problems than transportation of
tourists, shoppers, and whoever is going to spend money at some trendy
restaurant.

It seems to me that the people spending time to allocate money to this sort of
stuff are out of touch on what they should be allocating money towards. But
hey, I'm just a lowly citizen with no experience in local politics.

[1]
[http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/](http://www.themilwaukeestreetcar.com/)

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eropple
I know nothing about Milwaukee (some folks would say "you didn't have to add
"about Milwaukee"), but there is a tendency for car-owning Americans to eschew
buses even in places, like Boston where I live, because buses are "for poor
people". It's a messaging problem.

~~~
johndotsun
I think part of the issue is that in areas where there's not super abundant
public transit that the majority of the population uses instead of cars, the
likelihood of having a negative encounter with the type of people that are so
unpleasant that you'd normally do anything possible to avoid them goes up
significantly. My personal anecdote: when I lived in DC I never had any
problems with the Metro buses or trains even in the poorer areas. When I lived
in a coastal county in the panhandle of Florida I would sometimes take a bus
on one of the very few lines that existed, serviced exclusively by very small
buses and only a few times a day. During one of my trips I had to step in to
stop this older man in his late 30's from physically harassing underage girls
which led to police involvement. Turns out that he had been a problem for the
bus line for a while but they couldn't ban him from the system because he was
threatening to involve some civil liberties group in a discrimination case. I
stopped taking the bus after that.

~~~
pm90
Yes this is unfortunately a problem everywhere, and I've seen this situation
sometimes in Austin, Texas. In addition to untoward incidents like you
mention, there are often homeless people taking the bus in the summers, I
beleive simply to get a respite from the heat in the air conditioned buses.
And while this might sound incredibly elitist, their stench is so bad I would
frequently have to try for another bus.

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WalterBright
I spent a week in Berlin recently, and it shows how a comprehensive mass
transit system ought to work. There are subways, trains, streetcars, and buses
all linked together. It's a marvelous system. You can get anywhere in the
metropolitan area quickly. There's no need to have a car at all.

~~~
pimeys
Adding to that, it's completely marvelous to cycle in here. Even when riding
amongst cars it always feels like you are just one of the vehicles and others
respect your position in the traffic.

And there are almost no hills...

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WalterBright
Seattle keeps trying to turn itself into a bikeable city, but the hills make
it a trial for anyone not training for the Tour de France.

To further make the point, in Europe, people bicycle in street clothes. In
Seattle, it's hard to find a biker who isn't wearing a Tour de France racing
outfit.

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corybrown
Seems like that in every US city. Biking is almost a lifestyle with special
clothes and gear.

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vorg
Had to laugh when I saw the overhead wires in the pic of the streetcar.

It you click on the "related stories" link titled "In D.C. And China, Two
Approaches To A Streetcar Unconstrained By Wires", you can read about
Guangzhou's wireless tram: "You can see that as the train enters the station,
it just lightly touches those contact strips, and in 20 seconds it's fully
charged and ready to go to the next station".

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djsumdog
Seattle has a very over-complicated overhead system so the trams can share
streets with electric trolly buses. It took took a lot of additional time to
deploy due to that. Wellington decided to ditch electric trolly buses (and
ignored recommendations by residents to re-implement an airport/golden-mile
tram, sadly).

The battery tech in non-overheard wire based trams is still pretty expensive
and high maintenance. I really don't think it's worth the price.

Rail take years to setup, and despite it being amazing and necessary, it's
also political suicide in America's "We hate public transport because <insert
reason here>" America is decades behinds the world in real public transport;
including mid/high income countries that are way less densely populated.

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csours
I visited Seattle recently and wondered what was up with that. That and the
monorail...

As it is, I mostly walked everywhere, including from the Space Needle over to
Safeco Field.

~~~
35bge57dtjku
To be fair that monorail was built a really long time ago. And are any of
those things really better than the existing buses?

~~~
djsumdog
This goes back to Americans hating public transport for really silly reasons
and voting down the expansion of the Monorail's green line. It was already
funded too:

[http://seattlemonorail.org/smp/greenmap.html](http://seattlemonorail.org/smp/greenmap.html)

Seattle turned down the federal money that would eventually become Atlanta's
MARTA system.

~~~
signalling
This is a gross mischaracterization. I lived in Seattle at the time. The green
line project was born, and only lived as long as it did, due to public support
in four consecutive ballot initiatives. Let's review:

* The first in 1997 basically blessed the project and created the corporate entity to build it, got 53% of the vote.

* A second in 2000 approved public funds to plan it and passed with 56%.

* A third in 2002 approved a motor vehicle excise tax to fund it, and was more controversial (since real money was at stake) and only squeaked through with 50.2% of the vote.

* A fourth initiative in 2004 was intended to kill the project by directing the city to deny air rights above public streets to the project, and was thumped with 64% voting no.

* It was the fifth initiative in 2005 that killed the project, demanded by the city after a disastrous financing plan was announced (The excise tax approved in the 2002 referendum did not deliver the expected revenue, and a ridiculous financing scheme was proposed to cover the shortfall that would result in $9 billion in interest being paid on $2 billion in construction.) And on top of that, the line was significantly shortened, dropping desperately needed service to Ballard.

The fate of this project is more an object lesson in what it takes to actually
accomplish a project with popular support in the face of sustained opposition.
The whole project was _hated_ from the get-go by some big money in town who
had de-facto control over the city council and the mayoralty. That's why there
were so many ballot initiatives - the city government was dragged kicking and
screaming _by the public, through votes_ to build the damn thing, in the face
of well-financed campaigns against the enabling referendums.

In the end, it took self-inflicted injury by the project staff (bad financing
plan on top of a scaled-back green line) to get the public to pull the plug. I
don't think it's fair to pin the failure of this particular project on "hating
public transport for silly reasons."

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kainolophobia
I rode this last night. It has a flaw that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.

In the midtown area, the streetcar tracks are in the outermost lanes of the
6-lane street. This causes a problem at intersections because the Qline can
easily be blocked by cars that are trying to turn right off of Woodward (the
main road).

The problem gets worse when you consider that this rail line was built to
incentivize more people to come downtown. More foot traffic will inevitably
block more cars at crosswalks, which in turn slows down the streetcar.

I'm assuming they can attempt to fix this by limiting the number of legal
right hand turns or fix the lights to stay green until the streetcar passes
through, but I'm not sure there will ever be enough pressure to do so.

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jpatokal
One thing that's particularly absurd about this line: the headway (average
time between trains) is _20 minutes_ , and they don't even publish the
schedule! Meanwhile, the existing bus service along the same road will
continue to operate at 6-8 minute intervals...

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mbfg
Curious as to why these are better than buses? Are they that much more energy
efficient or something to account for the high cost of installation?

~~~
tmphgfdhslfd
Ridership goes up when bus lines are converted to tram lines, by something
like 50%, or at least that's what I remember from an article I read years ago
about that sort of thing here in Munich (which I can't seem to find).

Personally, I prefer the tram to the (Diesel) bus, since it's less shaky, less
noisy, wider, longer and brighter. It's really a much nicer way to travel.
Trams also tend to get their own signals and/or lanes a lot more than buses
seem to, but that's of course not an inherent feature.

~~~
smileysteve
Electric vehicles provide an interesting outlook as they would have lower
maintenance, less braking, no fuel smell, and no vibration. Along with more
active suspension technologies.

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iso-8859-1
More info on Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QLine)

Note that all rides are free this weekend!

