Detroit’s plan to spend $550 million building a nine-mile light-rail line on Woodward Avenue would be laughable if it weren’t wasting so much money that could actually do something useful if spent on something else. Detroit leaders have convinced themselves that light rail is world-class transportation, that it will be the lynchpin of Detroit’s recovery, and that it will keep young people in the city.
A shadowy group of so-called private investors known as the M-1 Rail group have actually agreed to put up $100 million of the cost of the project. They aren’t expecting any financial return on this money; more than a third of this amount is coming from the S. H. Kresge Foundation and is being donated as an act of charity. Strangely, the arrangement almost foundered on the seemingly trivial question of whether the tracks should go down the middle of Woodward Avenue (as local residents preferred) or be in the curbside lane (as the M1 group preferred). One pundit went so far as to call this the “Lincoln-Douglas debate of our time.” So serious is this debate that one more transit agency leader has lost his job over rail transit.
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