1987
50 cents. Fast Passes are also available.
- Knit Around Downtown. From 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday evenings, people come from parts far and wide to ride around on the People Mover and knit or crochet. Cost is just 50 cents (the People Mover fare).
It is no surprise that Detroit, the Motor City, was designed for cars. In fact, the city has no commuting subway/train system like other cities. Adding such a system so late in the game proved beyond the budget and conviction of Detroit’s City Council, but a smaller system was possible. Following the circular pattern created by the hub-and-spoke design of the downtown streets, the People Mover was built and in use by 1987.
The train, consisting of just a few cars, travels in one direction around a three-mile long, elevated track that circles the perimeter of downtown. The circuit has 13 stops and takes about 15 minutes to travel. It is mostly utilized by commuters from the suburbs, who don’t want to move their cars when traveling within the downtown area. To this purpose, it proved successful, keeping foot traffic flowing within the city and businesses going.
The People Mover provides a nice riding experience as the cars are kept very clean and the fare very cheap at 50 cents a token. Two of the stops are incorporated into existing buildings, and the other stops have stations designed to make waiting in winter comfortable. Not that the two-to-three minute wait between trains is long, but the art work gracing each station is a definite perk that prevents Detroiters from getting bored. The
art work has become a point of pride for the city and has even inspired its own book, Art in the Stations (
).
The People Mover has garnered its fair share of criticism, however, in that its closed circuit doesn’t really go anywhere. The fact that it only goes in one direction is also a problem, forcing some users to complete an entire circuit to go a matter of blocks. The area contained within and along the path of the People Mover is also considered too small by many because it leaves out the museum area and Wayne State University.
- Detroit Downtown People Mover, University of Washington Faculty website
