It was three years ago this month that the Free Press told of James Robertson — dubbed “the Walking Man” for his 21 miles of intrepid daily walking, in all kinds of weather, to and from home in Detroit and a factory job in suburbia.

Within a week there was an outpouring of sympathy, then crowd-funding donations of $360,000 and finally the gift Robertson longed for — a car.

This week, his story flashed anew at a conference in Texas on how to get urban Americans out of poverty. A presentation called “The Road to Economic Mobility” used Robertson’s story to, in effect, make Detroit the poster child for a city without good transit options.

Yet, the presentation by a prominent think tank went well beyond that, highlighting something else about metro Detroit that Robertson said made sense to him, as he drove a reporter to a restaurant meal this week in his three-year-old metallic-red Ford Taurus — the still-gleaming gift of a car dealer in Sterling Heights.

Past stories:

►Heart and sole: Detroiter walks 21 miles in work commute

►A new home, a different life for walking man

►'Walking man' settles into new life, friends, waist size

►Story of Detroit's Walking Man, James Robertson, to be documentary

That something else was the conclusion by some urban experts that low-income Americans need more than mass transit to get out of poverty. They need cars, too. The nation's urban poor people need affordable passenger vehicles, in addition to mass transit, if they're to share in the American dream, according to research presented Tuesday in Dallas by the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.

That presentation gave a double whammy to Detroit because multiple surveys have found the city to have the nation’s highest car insurance rates. It was the high price of car insurance in Detroit — as high as $5,000 a year in Robertson’s old North End neighborhood, even for older drivers with good records like him — that for more than a dozen years forced “Walking Man” to keep on walking, Robertson said in previous Free Press reports.

These days, he lives in Troy, where car insurance is far less costly than in Detroit. Robertson's premiums are paid by deductions from a trust fund of his crowd-funded windfall, he said. Could he have a reliable car, and insure it, on his yearly income of less than $27,000? It wouldn't be easy, said boosters of mass transit.

"We've always said it was critical for southeast Michigan to have a range of transit options, and that includes cars, but the car for so long has been the only option," said Megan Owens, executive director of the nonprofit, Detroit-based Transportation Riders United.

"It just isn't safe for people to walk or bike in so much of our region, and the price of car insurance has been out of reach in Detroit for a lot of people," Owens said.

There's some good news for transit users in metro Detroit. The QLINE has extended its late-night service hours, the SMART bus service based in suburban Detroit has added "FAST" express buses including service to Metro Airport, and the Detroit-based DDOT bus system is running 10,000 more hours of service each week, Owens said.

Still, the setbacks are sobering: the 2016 defeat at the polls of a regional transit tax, and recent statements by leaders in Oakland and Macomb counties that backed away from wholehearted support for a future transit tax. And last fall, the Michigan Legislature defeated a proposal by Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan aimed at giving relief to Michiganders struggling to afford the state's costly car insurance.

After a broken arm forced her to stop driving, Patricia Hardaway said she learned quickly about the limits of bus transit in metro Detroit.

"I couldn't believe how hard it was to get from my office (in downtown Detroit) to my physical therapy in Farmington," said Hardaway, who runs MOSES, an interfaith nonprofit group in Detroit that has campaigned for better mass transit.

In Tuesday's presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, senior fellow Rolf Pendalla of the Urban Institute Pendall cited years of research showing that passenger vehicles as well as mass transit are vital for boosting the status of low-income Americans. Pendalla's presentation, “The Road to Economic Mobility,” used Free Press photos of Robertson to bring its point home to an audience of Dallas business and nonprofit executives, community leaders and social service organizers.

"It's easy to picture a rail line or a bus route. What's harder is to analyze just how people get to their destinations on chains of transportation methods," Pendall said.

Detailed research shows that big cities need both, he said.

"We need to think more broadly about access to transportation for low-income people, reinforcing transit but also accommodating families whose schedules just can't work without at least one car. I'm thinking especially of single moms of small children," Pendall said, in a phone interview. "It's hard to imagine any transit system that Detroit could build to allow her to do without a car plus get training or work,"

He ended a recent research paper with the words, "Even as highly educated millennials and baby boomers fantasize about car-free cities, car access is still indispensable for many families seeking safety and economic security."

The challenge for policy makers with nonprofit and government-assistance organizations is to embrace all means of transportation for those in poverty, and to devise ways that low-income Americans can become more savvy car buyers and owners, so they aren't taken advantage of by "dodgy" car sellers and predatory lenders, Pendall said. Instead of thinking "cars versus transit," policy makers "should be thinking: transit, cars, walking, bikes" and more, he said.

"I think Mr. Robertson's story is real compelling. I hope he managed to hang onto the car," Pendall said.

Hang onto his Taurus, and then some, Robertson certainly has. He keeps it washed and totally depends on his car now, he said. It recently took him to far-flung destinations that included a sister's recent funeral in Redford Township, baseball workouts at a sports dome on Detroit's east side and strolling through the North American International Auto Show — twice — in Detroit's downtown Cobo Center.

► Oakland County's L. Brooks Patterson says he'll oppose broad effort to fund mass transit

►Metro Detroit doesn't have a regional transit plan

At the auto show, Robertson said he wasn't shy about his preference for Ford vehicles.

"I told one couple, look at the Fords. Fusion? OK. Taurus, definitely," he said chuckling. His walking days are over, said Robertson, 59, as he drove with a reporter this week just at the speed limit in the right lane. He had the driver's seat tilted back to accommodate his physique — beefier now that he no longer puts in eight or more hours a day walking.

As Robertson wheeled through a turn in his Taurus, loaded with options by the donor dealership — Suburban Ford in Sterling Heights — Robertson kidded with his passenger: "Watch this master at work."

As exuberant as he is at showing off his car — he especially likes the rear-view camera for backing into parking spots, Robertson still thinks about the region's bus riders, he said. He starred in a local movie that plugged last fall's millage ballot measure for mass transit, and he was disappointed when residents of Macomb and Oakland counties voted it down, he said.

"That proposal for the transit — that wasn't our best showing. It didn't pass," he said.

Aware that he could retire on his nest egg, Robertson still works at least 40 hours a week, still at the same plastic injection-molding machine shop in Rochester Hills, still at a modest hourly rate. After two raises, he's up to $12.30 an hour.

But thanks to thousands of donors, he's off the bus. He no longer worries about bus schedules, transfer tickets and the condition of his walking shoes. He's off the bus, for good. Sounding like the quintessential metro Detroit driver, he had choice words for everybody's favorite punching bag — the roads.

"You can have all the mass transit you want to. If they aren't going to fix the potholes, that mass transit isn't going to mean anything," he said.

Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com