Yes, Detroit once had commuter rail (with pictures!)

Last updated on: August 7, 2014 at 5:10 pm by Jane the Actuary

Yes, Detroit once had commuter rail (with pictures!) 2014-08-07T17:10:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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So, in lighter news (that is, as a break from ISIS, Gaza, Ukraine, the US/Mexico border, etc.), Megan McArdle blogged yesterday about the not-entirely-logical preference of city planners for streetcars over buses. She writes that streetcars are more expensive and less flexible, which she sees as bugs, but speculates that planners see this as a feature, since developers and prospective residents will feel that the line is more permanent, and thus more of a selling point, than a bus line.

Now, I think there are a couple true advantages of streetcars, vs. buses: they are (or, let’s face it, maybe only are perceived to be, but same thing) a more comfortable ride than a bus, and (based on my experience in Munich) even when they run literally on the street, they are more reliable. (It seems to me that they also had right-of-way at intersections.)

But here’s a curious example:

Detroit is building a light rail project right now, and it’s a textbook case of everything that’s wrong with American streetcar construction. Based on the official website, the streetcar line will only be 3.3 miles long, from downtown to the New Center/Midtown area, with 20 stops, which, as the Economist blog that McArdle links to points out, are far too many, making the streetcar line exceptionally slow.

The total project cost is $137 million, which is certainly scaled down from the original $500 million 9-mile project, according to this Reason article. The feds are paying $40 million, and the remainder of the funds are coming from foundations, but this isn’t free money, of course — those same foundations could otherwise be funding ambulances, or water bills, say.

And the short distance means it’s not much more useful than the People Mover — which itself was originally conceived of as the first step of a larger project including light rail.

But here’s what I can’t figure out:

As recently as 1983, Detroit had a commuter rail line, stretching out as far as Pontiac, following, more or less, the same path as this project, a rail line that ran, for most of its path, parallel to and not far from Woodward. Here’s a link to a Wikipedia article on this rail line. And — hey, for some years, dear old Dad, who spent most of his working lifetime at the Tech Center, was instead at the GM Building downtown, and he took the train every day, until they shut down the train for lack of ridership.
SEMTA GP-18 / GP-10 #903
Source: http://www.rrpicturearchives.net/showPicture.aspx?id=3048725 as found on google images.

Now, to be sure, it may be that in 1983, governments were less willing to subsidize transit at the levels needed to keep it going. Perhaps 1983 was the nadir of downtown commuters (though I’d be surprised).

But why, except for a magical belief in the power of streetcars, is the city now engaged in a major construction project, when all it really would need to do is buy some rolling stock and restart the line? (This is only semi-rhetorical — I’ve been looking for an answer to this question online and I’m not finding anything, except, as another puzzle, articles reporting that there is a true commuter train along existing rails in development to Ann Arbor.)

UPDATE: My husband and I were talking about this, and he looked around a little online to get an answer to the qusetion, “how much does it cost to build a streetcar in Germany?” He didn’t find one solid answer, but according to one article he found, the city of Neu-Ulm rejected a 13 km streetcar line because its pricetag, at EUR 86 million (approx. USD 110 million), was too high. In other words, Americans can’t even build streetcars right.

Another update: more pictures at this website, including the schedule for the bus my dad would have taken to get to the station. Here’s one:

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