Excerpts from the article:
Crain’s asked its readers how Detroit could reinvent itself in the wake of the Super Bowl and the answer came through loud and clear: Build mass transit.
More than 390,000 suburbanites and visitors traveling downtown during Super Bowl faced hours-long waits for travel both ways at peak times. Combined with regular Detroit Department of Transportation routes, more than 815,000 people made their way around metro Detroit by bus during the four days leading up to the Super Bowl, twice as many as regular ridership would have been, DDOT said in a statement.
A well-planned regional transit system would not only keep people coming downtown for future events, readers say, but also for day-to-day jaunts to the city that would lead to development of more retail, entertainment and jobs downtown.
Whether using light rail or bus, Detroit needs a transit network that will not only connect it to Detroit Metropolitan Airport and Ann Arbor, but to other suburbs in Oakland and Macomb Counties.
Detroit also needs to be acknowledged as the region’s “core” for entertainment and the arts, said Robin Boyle, chair of Wayne State University’s department of geography and urban planning, and supported with strong transit links between Detroit neighborhoods with convenient transfer hubs to the suburbs.
Whatever our differences before, readers said, figuring out how to connect as a region will be the cornerstone of any success plan for Detroit.
“It obviously takes vast amounts of capital, but the best resource is cooperation,” said David Stedman, owner of USA Reps in Royal Oak. “We can no longer abide with an ‘us vs. them’ attitude. A person is only as strong as their heart, and the heart of our area is Detroit. The city was built from the river, north, east and west. ... It worked once. It can work again.”
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