During the last election cycle, the residents of the counties comprising Greater Detroit were asked to approve a millage that would install a transit system linking the beleaguered region together. To call this decision monumental would be understating its importance to the health of Southeast Michigan's economy, attracting young citizens attuned to a carless lifestyle (who also might be inclined to work at the second headquarters of a Seattle-based online retailer), and limiting the sprawl of the suburbs.

Welcome to Curbed’s first-ever Transportation Week! From how to improve public transportation in cities, ranking the best car-free neighborhoods across the country, and a friendly competition between NYC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to determine which has the best public transit, this week is all about how we get around in our favorite cities. All aboard!

In so many words, the multi-modal plan was: Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, would flow through the main arteries of the area: Woodward, Gratiot, and Michigan; express lines would finally connect the Detroit Metropolitan Airport to the city core 20 miles away; regional rail would extend from leafy Ann Arbor to the heart of New Center in Detroit; cross-county connectors would comb through the grid and tie the counties together. An extensive plan, to be sure, but the area of our metro region is relatively extensive; it's also just normal. Why wouldn’t someone be able to use public transit to go between Detroit and Detroit Metro Airport?

It failed—not spectacularly, but not without precedent. From the postwar period onward, Metro Detroit has consistently deprived itself of a functioning transit system. There seem to be underlying forces that have kept this region’s transit deficiencies from becoming more robust.

“Perhaps the best opportunity to create a cohesive regional transit system for metropolitan Detroit occurred between the late 1960s and 1980, a period during which political will in support of regional transit peaked, and the federal government made public transit funding relatively abundant,” writes Mario Goetz, in his paper A Dream Derailed. Despite the administrations of Governor William Milliken and Mayor Coleman Young working together, along with a Michigander (President Gerald Ford) in the White House, the balkanization of the metro region—fed, in part, by the legislature that effectively halted Detroit from annexing suburbs—allowed a deep parochialism and hyper-local isolationism to mature.

What was transit like before, as the population of Detroit swelled and the city matured? What did it try to be? To run through it quickly: in 1863, a horse-drawn streetcar begins service to a city with a land area of 12.7 square miles; the streetcar turns electric in 1892 under the administration of Mayor Hazen Pingree; in 1920, Mayor James Couzens vetoes plans for a subway (and the city council’s override fails by a single vote); buses appear in 1925; in 1933, Detroit voters actually approve a subway, but the state advisory board denies construction.

By 1945, the streetcar system is running 908 cars on 19 routes; 11 years later, the service ends; in the early 1960s, President John Kennedy seeks solutions to urban decay by funding public transit; in 1967, the Southeast Michigan Transportation Authority (SEMTA) forms; in 1976, President Ford puts $600 million dollars on the table for Southeast Michigan to build a light rail system.

Throughout the 1970s, Governor Milliken, a moderate Republican in the vein of Nelson Rockefeller, continued to work at his designs of a public transit network with a strong brand of altruism, which was bolstered with the election of Mayor Coleman Young in 1974. In 1979, a multi-modal plan from SEMTA was to expand the bus system and park-and-rides, principally to connect with a proposed People Mover in the Central Business District; additionally, a Woodward Avenue light rail would connect the State Fairgrounds to the Riverfront, with an elevated section from 6 Mile to the Boulevard. As time went on, the plans became smaller in scope. Sound familiar?

SEMTA received the majority of its funding from grants, and the state was in economic decline. As the agency weakened, the Detroit News broke a story on the Oakland County Road Commission’s attempt to derail the Woodward subway. By 1981, Ronald Reagan became president and the federal funding that was reserved for transit was largely cut.

One part of the plan did materialize, albeit years late. In 1987, the People Mover opened to fanfare and confusion. With a price tag of over $200 million dollars, the system was still 80% federally funded. It was the second automated monorail of its kind, behind the 1.9-mile Metromover in Miami. The trapezoidal loop connects thirteen stations around downtown Detroit, but the People Mover was never intended to be a standalone concept.

The automobile prevailed. But planning this region solely for the automobile has directly inhibited the quality of life of the residents. Even before the advent of the urban depressed freeway (the Davison in Highland Park) the governing aesthetic of metro Detroit had been the road. Michigan Avenue, a state highway running through Corktown, underwent a widening to be nine lanes wide. It has never recovered.

Two sentiments here are applicable: Andres Duany said, “the Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman.” And it was Lewis Mumford who said, “the right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age where everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”

But what about those who don’t drive? Don’t forget the story the Detroit Free Press broke about James Robertson (aka the ‘Walking Man’) whose four-hour, 23-mile commute took him across communities that have ‘opted-out’ of bus service, from his home in Detroit to his auto job in Oakland County. Even with the context of this being a very broken system, it’s a difficult story to swallow.

Before 1956, Detroit had the largest streetcar system in the nation. In fact, once upon a time, every major U.S. city had a streetcar system, and most of them were “torn out in a vast criminal conspiracy that is well documented” as Jeff Speck writes in Walkable City. The lines were bought and closed by National City Lines, a company created by General Motors, Mack Truck, Firestone Tire, and others. When the conspiracy was proven, a judge ordered the executives to be fined $1.

The streetcar has returned in the form of the 3.3-mile-long QLINE, which leaves most of the city and region out of its range. But remember there was once a plan worth building on—when the city, state, and national government cooperated better—to build a subway for that same avenue, once upon a time.