Ashley Williams knows firsthand what the intersection of Haggerty and 12 Mile roads at the Novi-Farmington Hills border means for someone trying to get to work in metro Detroit on public transportation.

That's where workers headed to jobs at Twelve Oaks Mall have to get off a bus and start walking west along a 1.6-mile stretch of busy road, using a patchwork of sidewalks and worn paths in the grass. In 2016 and 2017, Williams was one of those workers, traveling from Detroit to Novi.

Novi, a magnet for lower-wage retail jobs in the region, is one of 39 communities in Oakland County that have walled themselves off from the Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART) bus system — creating barriers for workers trying to get to jobs and employers trying to find help with reliable transportation.

"It's very inconvenient," said Williams, a 20-year-old Detroiter who would spend four to five hours a day traveling by bus, foot and bike from northwest Detroit to minimum-wage jobs at the Novi mall last winter.

I rode Williams' former commute route last week to figure out how people get from Detroit's Brightmoor neighborhood — one of the poorest areas in the poorest city in America — to Novi, one of the affluent SMART opt-out communities that Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson has vowed to shield from being drawn into a revised Regional Transit Authority taxing district.

From Brightmoor, a neighborhood built in the 1920s to house workers at auto factory jobs that have largely disappeared, the logical route to Twelve Oaks would be a 25-minute drive northwest up Grand River Avenue.

But because Novi isn't part of the region's spotty mass transportation system, the route is anything but logical.