Celebrate QLINE and keep at transit efforts across metro Detroit

One small step for transit.

One giant leap for metro Detroit.

The debut of the M-1 streetcar line (I’m still working to the point where I can call it the QLINE without grimacing), set for Friday, reminds us at once of everything that’s wrong, and everything that could be right, in our 40-year history of losing efforts to bring rational transit to our area.

The 3.3-mile line, which cost in excess of $140 million, took 10 years to construct and had to be funded with an unprecedented contribution of private and philanthropic money, is hardly a mass-transit archetype.

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But what we’ve got coming, after all the ups and downs and false starts to this project, is a functional system for traversing the densest parts of the city’s recovering core. A 24-minute ride from Grand Boulevard to Campus Martius that will give a kick to the already-burgeoning development along Woodward. A rail spine that could be predicate for a much larger system that branches out from Woodward to other parts of the city and region.

And when it clangs to life with paying riders this week, it will be a huge psychological win — only the second transit victory in my four-decade lifetime in this city, coming nearly 30 years after the construction of the People Mover and just months after this region’s 40th failure to build and fund a regional transit authority.

We've been losing so long on this issue, licking our wounds from disappointment so often, that I fear we don't really know what a win looks like, feels like, or means to us.

This is it, folks. At least for us. At least for now.

And if we take our cues from the promise of this project, rather than damning it for what it isn't, we can catapult ourselves to something much bigger, much better and more useful to people all over this region.

Can we celebrate that? I think we can, as long as we keep in perspective how much work lies ahead. I think we should, given how rare the opportunity presents itself for us to be proud of any transit-related victory in southeast Michigan.

For the record, I know this is the very intent of this project’s godfathers, the philanthropic and private interests that made extraordinary investments and weathered a decade of bizarre, winding political back and forth to get it built and running.

No one ever sold this as a solution to this area’s atrocious mass-transit troubles. And even when they were contemplating a revised plan that would have extended the line to 8 Mile (at a cost of $800 million that no one really had handy), they were careful not to oversell.

But as a region, the culture of failure that surrounds mass transit drives us to assign unreasonable expectations to any idea for change, and to curse small, discrete proposals for not being massive, all-in-one solutions.

We are in deep, abiding love with zero-sum analysis -- certain that a win in one area means everyone else is losing.

The streetcars are an opportunity to rethink that self-defeating framework.

They are a trundling expression of “can-do,” stretched from the foot of our region down the first few miles of our most vital artery.

Qualified elation is what we owe the project. Unhindered determination to make it better is what we owe ourselves.

Next steps

The key now is to capitalize on what the street cars give us — and to do so now, building on their momentum.

There are a number of ways to make sure that happens:

• Start planning the next leg of the system now. Once the Regional Transit Authority gets new leadership, it ought to be a priority to start drawing out where the streetcar goes next. If you add a spur going east or west (I’ve seen some preliminary plans for a Jefferson line), you instantly make it more useful for people outside the downtown/Midtown corridor.

If we could get our act together to create something like Bus Rapid Transit along Woodward or other spurs, that could also augment the streetcar. The quicker this becomes part of a system, the better.

The People Mover is only an object of ridicule because it was a stunted version of a bigger plan, thwarted by small-minded suburban resistance to Detroit Mayor Coleman Young’s vision for a hub-and-spoke rail system that would have reached the region’s most remote population centers.

Given that history, and the long time frame it took to raise money and get clearances for the first 3.3-mile stretch, starting early on expanding the streetcar line is important. The good news is that building M-1 puts us in the running, at least, for more federal support. The feds have changed the rules so that only cities with existing systems will get funding in the future.

And the metro area is getting a kind of bonus from construction of the initial streetcar line: In addition to the federal contribution to the project, the private spending qualifies us for match dollars, somewhere around $60 million, that can be spent on other transit projects.

• Connect the streetcar to other transit. It will operate, for the initial going, independently of everything else — including public buses in Detroit, the People Mover and the suburban bus system that reaches into the city. We should place a priority on making it possible to move seamlessly from the streetcars to the other systems, as a first step toward the integrated system we will need eventually.

At minimum, you ought to be able to buy transit passes that allow you to ride what you need to ride to wherever it is you need to go.

• Integrate operations for the streetcar with other transit. The private funders for M-1 have raised enough money, at least on paper, to operate the streetcar through 2022 without any taxpayer contribution. We should hope that holds, and that costs don’t outstrip what they’ve got in hand.

But we should also begin working to fund the streetcar operations alongside the region’s other transit. That means taking another run (yes, a 41st in my lifetime) at a well-funded protocol for regional transit. Long-term, the streetcar should be part of the public transit system and should enjoy the same support as the other parts.

I’m as worried as anyone else that our first transit win in such a long time is a short line that services the parts of town that already have the most going for them.

That transit woes that cry out loudest for attention are in Detroit’s most isolated neighborhoods, and in the reaches of the suburbs that are experiencing their own growth in poverty and disconnectedness.

But this region also has a profound problem with zero-sum thinking. We love to see a win by anyone else as a loss for us.

And that’s how we all keep losing.

The streetcar is a success, period. It brought private, philanthropic and public forces together across a long span of time and a ton of frustration to produce an accessible new way to get around a key part of the city.

Federal officials, whose exasperation with this project’s fits and starts once brought them to the brink of pulling out, in the end praised this region for its collaborative strength and innovation.

We can celebrate that locally, too, without giving up on our commitment to building something larger for the region.

Contact Stephen Henderson: shenderson600@freepress.com