World offers Detroit examples of good urban transit

One of the most oft-quoted presences in the Detroit development scene in recent years has been neither a developer nor a politician but an academic: Robin Boyle, the long-time chair of urban planning at Wayne State University.

Quoted dozens of times in local media over the years on trends in Detroit’s revitalization, Boyle just returned to Detroit from a nearly year-long sabbatical that took him to the Ruhr Valley in western Germany and to Melbourne, Australia.

Knowing that an acute observer of cities like Boyle would have a lot to say about what those urban areas could offer metro Detroit, I caught up with him recently.

His main takeaway: Both the Ruhr Valley, a network of nine cities including Dortmund, Essen, and others that traditionally housed Germany’s steelmaking and other industry, and the rapidly growing Melbourne region (recently ranked as the most livable city in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual global livability index) offer robust networks of public transportation that metro Detroit so far can only dream of.

Those transit options include comprehensive systems of inter-city trains, subways, downtown streetcars and trams, buses, and bicycle and walking paths, all connected in vast networked systems.

To be sure, Boyle said, Germans still love their cars and jetting along at high speeds on their autobahns, but public transportation is equally a way of life for them.

“They complain about transit but I can tell you it was seamless,” he said of traveling around the Ruhr Valley area. “You could go from one end of the Ruhr to the other on public transport. You’re moving through different communities but you wouldn’t know it. And if you get off the train, it doesn’t matter, you can just get on another.”

Nor were bicycle and walking paths neglected.

“Everywhere you went the first thing you saw was a big map beside the bus station or the train station, where the pathways was as highly noticeable on the map as the roads, as clear, so you could work out how to walk everywhere you went. We could walk literally everywhere,” he said.

In Melbourne, he found much the same, including a downtown tram network that was free to ride. Like the systems in Germany, it provided a reliable, safe and inexpensive alternative to the automobile.

These systems make extensive use of high technology, with user-friendly apps for phones and informative electronic messaging at most stops. Prepaid smart cards make it simple to navigate the networks. “And yes,” Boyle said, “in both cities the buses and trams did run on time.”

It hardly seems necessary to contrast those robust networks of public transit with the pathetic lack of options in Detroit. Here our city and suburban bus lines still operate separately, there are no commuter rail lines linking city and suburbs, and even the promising M-1 Rail streetcar line coming in 2017 will initially run only a little more than three miles on Woodward Avenue.

“What we came home with was a sense that people in these modern, attractive cities deeply appreciate the connectedness that good public transportation offers,” Boyle said. “They and their employers are prepared to invest in these transportation systems, just as they are eager to see good roads for their cars.”

What would it take for metro Detroit to achieve that level of connected public transportation?

First, Boyle said, plans and visions must include a commitment to public transportation and the necessary funding. Second, civic and business leaders must believe in transportation choice. “It’s not the car or transit,” Boyle said. “It is both.”

And third, the community must buy into the concept that effective and efficient public transportation translates into improving the quality of life for our cities.

A tall order? Sure. But possible, as so many other cities around the world already have shown.

Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.