It is March 30th and that means one very important thing to citizens across the entire state of Michigan—baseball opening day is tomorrow. Love it or hate it, baseball will be invading Detroit for the next 6 months. An avid sports fan, I am in the camp of loving it. My wife and I will undoubtedly be spending a lot of time at Comerica Park this summer.
However, this year will be a bit different for us now that we live in Detroit. On weekdays when the Tigers have a game, I’m mentally preparing to face traffic delays coming home from work and a more limited selection of available street parking as everyone drives to the stadium to see the game. But why is this? My wife and I have a tradition where we try to go to at least one Tiger’s away game every year. So far, we’ve watched the Tigers play at U.S Cellular Field (Chicago), Fenway Park (Boston) and Wrigley Field (Chicago again). For each of these games, we had no traffic problems and no parking problems. We were able to use the subway.
Public transportation in the D
According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, only 20% of the metropolitan Detroit population can reach their jobs within 90 minutes using public transportation. That ranks us as 71st out of the top 100 metro areas nationwide. Being in Detroit, it feels like you cannot go anywhere if you don’t have a car—which is a shame because that really takes some of the advantages of “city-living” away from its residents. In cities like New York, Washington DC and Boston, over 1/3 of the households don’t even own a car because public transportation can get them anywhere they need to go. Ironically, that statistic is rising more quickly for Detroit than in any of these cities not because Detroiters don’t need cars but because they can’t afford them. Parking and insurance rates (not to mention rent) have been on the rise and are making owning an automobile in the Motor City cost prohibitive. Public transportation is clearly needed and in a hurry.
Concept drawing for the M-1 rail
Enter the M-1 Rail
the Detroit News, the line will serve an estimated 1.8 million riders annually and is scheduled to start service in 2016.After years of discussion, the M-1 Rail project is finally scheduled to break ground this spring. While it won’t get us immediately to the complexity of a full-fledged subway, it’s a step in the right direction. The streetcar line will run down Woodward connecting the Fisher Building (West Grand Blvd) at the north end down to the Renaissance Center (Larned Street) with 9 stops in between. It will link to the People Mover at 2 of the stops in a manner that starts to make Detroit’s public transportation map look like those of bigger cities that have a loop around the downtown core with several transit lines shooting off of it. According to an article published by
While the new project won’t help me much this year, I look forward to the day when I can hop on the Woodward Express (my personal working title—if you have any good names for it, please post them in the comments below!) and catch a game without the headache of traffic or the wallet-draining parking fees that exist today. Until then, I’ll be joining the rest of the state in driving to the games (unless anyone knows where I can park a bike close by). Go Tigers!