Warren Evans departed a SMART bus recently at 10 Mile and Haggerty roads wearing a tan suit and brown leather shoes and started walking south along the shoulder through tall grass where there's no sidewalk in Novi.

The Wayne County executive walked the two miles from where the suburban bus service stops to the Best Buy electronics store on Haggerty off Eight Mile to illustrate the challenges of getting to work in metro Detroit when cities like Novi don't participate in the SMART regional bus system.

Evans demonstrated what he called the region's "fragmented" transportation system with the cameras rolling May 17, starting near MotorCity Casino on Grand River Avenue just before 10 a.m. and riding two buses for 90 minutes.

Then he spent the last hour hitting the pavement — and grass — to complete a 24-mile, 2 1/2-hour trek from downtown Detroit to a suburban shopping center. By car, this route takes a half-hour or less.

"I don't think this would be very exciting in January or February or on a rainy day," Evans says in a three-minute video documenting the trek along a road with sporadic sidewalk.

Evans took a similar path I explored on DDOT and SMART buses in February in an attempt to figure out what it takes to get from Detroit's poverty-stricken Brightmoor neighborhood to a low-wage job at Twelve Oaks Mall. (My three-bus trek ended at 12 Mile and Haggerty, where the sidewalk quickly ended and the midwinter snowdrifts began).

Because major jobs centers like Novi and Livonia have walled themselves off from the existing regional transit system, getting to these suburbs for work via public transportation is not easy.