Detroit deserves a great transit system. Our region needs the will to build it. | Opinion

The 2024 NFL draft was an absolute success for the city of Detroit. As great as downtown felt over the weekend, it sparkled that much more on national television.

The impression made was so positive the Wall Street Journal declared that Detroit is now a legitimate tourist destination in the same way as, say, Chicago or Toronto.

Like the Super Bowl, nearly 20 years ago, the draft showed that Detroit can be great, when the civic and regional will is there to make it great.

The only demerit Detroit earned was, as always in this Motor City, transportation.

Reports of lots charging $100 for a parking spot and the QLine overwhelmed by draft-hungry football fans proved to be draft weekend bummers for some.

It’s hard to blame parking lot owners for their prices. Parking for the draft isn’t essential like insulin or housing. With about 225,000 people coming downtown for the event each day, there was a finite supply of parking and an almost infinite demand. We can call this gouging, or we can be adults and acknowledge that lot owners were charging a fair market price for what is basically a luxury good in short supply.

It's also hard to knock the QLine for the long lines and overcrowding. A three-mile streetcar circulator isn’t intended to move hundreds of the thousands of people from across the region to a specific downtown event at the same time.

As event complaints go, this is (to quote a man who famously failed to acquire an NFL franchise) “small potatoes.”

However, it does expose the great unfinished challenge for Detroit’s revival — effective regional transit. After Super Bowl XL, transit was targeted as a regional priority. Unfortunately, the only thing that effort yielded was the QLine, which is a fine circulator, but sort of misses the point.

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After Super Bowl, we pledged to do better

The great transit success of the Super Bowl were the regional bus shuttles that brought people from across southeast Michigan downtown. These shuttles were an unqualified success. Ridership exceeded expectations, and riders enjoyed the convenience of getting downtown without the burden of a car.

SMART, metro Detroit's suburban bus system, did offer park and ride service for the draft. This time, it felt more like a stopgap than a step forward. That’s what’s so frustrating here. We have, for years, understood the problem that needs to be addressed. And still the will to address it isn’t there.

Nearly 20 years after the Super Bowl, everyday efficient city-suburb connectivity still remains less than comprehensive, spread between the suburban SMART system (which communities in the metro area can opt not to participate in, creating transit gaps) and the separate Detroit Department of Transportation. To understand just how much time we’ve wasted dithering on transit, consider that Lions first round pick Terrion Arnold was not yet 3 years old when the Steelers beat the Seahawks to win the Super Bowl at Ford Field in 2006.

Suburban communities opting out of SMART and DDOT that runs within the city of Detroit create barriers for efficiently commuting by transit from city to suburb or vice versa. The SMART routes that do service Detroit are often limited to short “rush hour” windows. The three FAST routes (Gratiot, Woodward, and Michigan) are the exception to that rule. Credit to SMART for developing FAST, but that level of service should be the norm rather than the exception. It’s not.

The region is also lacking true bus rapid transit service, which has proven to be popular and effective in numerous American cities including Cleveland, Las Vegas, and even Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Why do transit when you can do politics?

It’s not like opportunities haven’t existed to move forward on regional transit. The 2016 transit ballot proposal would have been a real, if imperfect, step forward. A lackluster campaign failed to impress voters and was defeated at the ballot box.

Two years later, leaders including Wayne County Executive Warren Evans offered a revised plan intended to address criticisms of the 2016 effort, but Oakland and Macomb Executives Brooks Patterson and Mark Hackel blocked any effort to put it before voters. SMART is simply enough regional transit for us, these well-automobiled men proclaimed.

Just before the pandemic hit, Oakland, Wayne and Washtenaw counties and Detroit pitched a transit plan that didn't involve Macomb (at that point, the lone holdout on a true regional transit initiative) but Republican lawmakers in Lansing decided they didn’t want to burden the voters of those counties with another transit proposal — especially one they might support.

We remain a region perhaps unique among the country’s great metropolises, held hostage by local myopians who simply cannot fathom the need for improving transit. Driving along M-59, Ford Road, Big Beaver and Gratiot, glistening parking lots fronting vast shopping complexes, why would anyone want to take a bus when they could drive? Better to focus on something important, like when to schedule the auto show.

Let metro Detroit be great

So here we are, a generation later and another extraordinary downtown event drawing people from across the region (and the world), wondering why getting downtown is such a hassle.

It's true that most days 200,000-plus people aren’t traveling downtown to watch football guys announce the names of other football guys. However, plenty of people are trying to get to work or school, the doctor, the supermarket, etc. For those who can’t or can’t afford to drive, transit is essential. For those who’d rather not pay to park, or to spend a good part of their day in a traffic jam, transit is invaluable.

One also might imagine that tourists staying downtown — maybe some of whom are the draft visitors the WSJ expects now see Detroit as a legitimate vacation spot — might appreciate a transit system that can take them to suburban attractions like Greenfield Village, Cranbrook or Metro Beach.

When a transit system can effectively serve these customers on ordinary days, it can also better serve folks needing a ride to extraordinary events like the draft or annual happenings the Grand Prix or the fireworks.

Great cities and regions build that kind of transit system. The draft, once more, proved Detroit can be a great city and region. It just needs the will to build the great transit system Detroit deserves.

Jeff Wattrick is a freelance writer who lives in Grosse Pointe Park. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print and online.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: After NFL draft, Detroit's regional transit failures are glaring