From Motor City to Metaphor City

"In Detroit in the Fifties, social mobility was marked not only by trading up but moving out. A traffic study conducted early in the decade forecast a 76-per-cent increase in vehicle traffic by 1980. In approving an extension of the Lodge Expressway, city burghers sealed a predictable migration to the suburbs, encouraging city dwellers to trade up and out, and, neatly, ensuring a homegrown market for the latest model car.

By failing to establish an extensive and effective inner-city transportation system, Detroit made itself the very model of social destabilization. There are those who blame the auto industry for that.

The streetcars that used to clatter down Elmore Leonard's beloved Woodward Avenue to Jefferson, where GM's headquarters looms, are long gone. There is no subway. And the in-city buses don't link up to the out-city buses. In Profile of a Metropolis, a congressman wondered, prophetically: 'Why speed the exodus from the city of the middle- and upper-income families?'

What Detroit has is the People Mover. The 50-cent, one-way skytrain that passes by the RenCen and 12 other stops downtown runs a loop that traverses a distance of a mere 2.9 miles, an easy jog. It was meant to be the linchpin for a top-of-the-line transit system. Instead it connects to nothing."