For 17 years, Brenda Black took three or four DDOT and SMART buses every day to get to her job as a convenience store cashier at Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

Her daily commute from the west side of Detroit to the airport terminals in Romulus took up to2 1/2 hours — one way.

Then, she'd navigate the bus system home, spending nearly five hours in transit for a roundtrip commute that takes 50 minutes by car.

Last year, the 63-year-old Detroiter's commute changed dramatically when SMART launched its limited-stop FAST service along Michigan Avenue from downtown Detroit to the airport, reducing her route to work to two buses and a 40-minute trek.

"That's the best thing they've ever done," Black said last Tuesday as she stepped off the FAST bus at the McNamara Terminal. "Whoever came up with this idea, thank you, thank you, thank you."

While the region's political and business leaders remain at odds over how to fund and build a public transit system that better resembles growing regions of the country, SMART's FAST service and improvements to the Detroit Department of Transportation's service are quietly showing what happens when buses arrive frequently on time and you eliminate barriers: People ride.

In June, SMART's weekday ridership on the Gratiot, Michigan and Woodward avenue corridors was up 49 percent from June 2017 before the FAST buses were introduced, an additional 4,500 weekday trips, according to the suburban transit agency.

In year-over-year growth, ridership on Woodward Avenue grew 22 percent on weekdays and 31 percent on Saturdays in June compared to June 2018, said Robert Cramer, deputy general manager of the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation.

"It's really outperformed our highest expectations," Cramer said.

The deployment of the FAST service, which costs $11 million to operate annually, is as much a response to market demands.

As more people are working downtown, the traditional one-person, one-car method of getting there has congested streets and parking spaces. Younger millennials are less interested in driving to work, even if they have a vehicle.

Improvements in regional bus service, such as the recent introduction of the Dart universal fare card for SMART and DDOT, has made moving from provider to provider easier.

"It used to be difficult taking the bus," said John Castle, who rides the Gratiot FAST bus daily from Roseville to downtown for his information technology job at Quicken Loans Inc.

Castle has been riding SMART buses to jobs in downtown Detroit for 14 years. "It's a heck of a lot cheaper than parking downtown," he said.

Because of parking constrictions downtown, Quicken Loans has recently started paying its employees $8 a day to commute to work by bus, bike, ride share, scooter, carpooling, walking or some multimodal combination.

"We don't want people to drive alone," said Kevin Bopp, vice president of parking and mobility at Bedrock LLC, the real estate arm of Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert's family of companies.

Bedrock has developed an app platform called My Commute for employees to navigate different modes of transportation to work. The app is integrated into their employee calendars to record when they shared a ride with a co-worker, earning both the $8 daily incentive to not drive alone.

Castle is among a cadre of Quicken Loans employees who are becoming internal company ambassadors for riding the bus, helping car-oriented co-workers navigate the bus systems — even offering to ride with them the first time.

"There's a ton of latent interest, but it's that first ride," Bopp said.

The organic "team member to team member" mobility mentoring, Bopp said, is "way more effective than the incentives have been."

It's part of a culture at Quicken Loans that's focused on changing habits to solve real parking and congestion bottlenecks, while building up demand for transit, Bopp said.

"It's dangling a carrot — let's get people to try something that they might otherwise not," Bopp said. "And once they try it, they may like it."

Quicken Loans also is working with SMART and DDOT to try to make access to the bus systems even more seamless by paying directly for employee fares.

All of these measures are born out of necessity for Bedrock as it manages a growing downtown real estate portfolio, the parking needs of office and commercial tenants and increasingly scarce parking near its buildings.

Other businesses and their executives in Detroit and the suburbs should take notice.

Changing the deep city-suburban divisions over paying for transit won't be easy (just look at Lansing's decadelong inability to close persistent shortfalls in road funding).

But changing mobility habits to build a consensus for a better transit system can start in the workplace.

That will require companies to begin viewing reliable public transit and alternative mobility options as a necessary component to their business model in moving workers across this sprawling and barrier-prone region.

If business leaders want better mass transit for metro Detroit, they can start by getting their own employees on the existing bus infrastructure and growing those services organically.

SMART has plans on the shelf to add FAST service along Grand River, Van Dyke and Telegraph. But those plans will be collecting dust until old habits change.