DETROIT: TRANSIT
Posted 31 May 2025
At its peak in the 20s, Detroit’s rail network had over 600 miles of electrified track, the fourth largest in the US. The network consisted of nearly 200 miles of intra-city streetcar service within Detroit, and over 400 miles of inter-city regional service to destinations including Ann Arbor, Flint, Pontiac, etc. Timetables indicate that frequency on local service was generally every 15 minutes or better, and regional service 30 or better (1). By 1956, the system had been entirely dismantled, the tracks paved over, and the electrical lines removed. The streetcars were replaced with a less frequent network of diesel buses, which only saw further cuts in the ensuing years as the city’s white population fled to the automobile-dependent suburbs, siphoning riders and funding (2).
The system had grown in the early 1900s, with lines radiating from Downtown facilitating the development of the housing necessary to absorb the city’s rapidly growing workforce. Streetcars connected new residential districts with jobs Downtown and the auto plants. For the city’s Black population, confined by redlining and restrictive covenants to the linear corridors surrounding Hastings St, Grand Blvd, and other pockets throughout the city (see previous post), the streetcar lines were critical links (with the Department of Street Railways also serving as a major employer, hiring many Black operators during WW2)(3). While Detroit had become the “Motor City” due to its dominance in automobile manufacturing, for the first half of the 20th century its working population—black and white—relied on transit.
Post-war suburbanization and white flight changed this dynamic. As white residents left the central city for the automobile-dependent suburbs (to which non-white residents were prevented from moving due to restrictive covenants), ridership slumped (4). While the city’s remaining population—30% Black in the 50s, rising to 80% by 1990—continued to rely on the network, business and political leaders became hostile to the system, which they viewed as literally in the way of the increasing numbers of suburban automobile commuters coming in and out of Downtown daily (5).
Similar to how the Hastings corridor through Black Bottom and Paradise Valley was destroyed to make way for improved connections to the suburbs (in the form of I-75, see previous post), city leaders began to see the tram network as hindering suburban automobile access to the core. By the 1950s, the aging trolleys—which frustrated drivers at every stop and whose ridership was increasingly nonwhite (reflecting the changing demographics in the central city)—had become dilapidated and slow, in need of significant modernization (6). Rather than reinvest in the network (or constructing one of the many subway/rapid transit proposals which the Department of Street Railways had considered prior to the war), city leaders looked to highways, representing the shift in postwar priorities (7). That the local public network was allowed to wither and be entirely removed after the war, with many of its primary corridors being transformed into highways for private transport, represents a municipal shift in focus away from facilitating urban mobility and towards facilitating suburban automobility—a shift that coincided with white flight and the demographic change of the central city.
For remaining residents, the shift did not go unnoticed. While many of the tram lines were replaced with buses, service was less frequent and less comfortable (and the early buses were highly polluting compared to the zero-emissions electric trams), with newspapers reporting widespread opposition to bus replacement (8). Despite opposition, the final tram lines were removed under the administration of Mayor Albert Cobo, the same mayor who had advocated for the construction of I75 and the “urban renewal” projects in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley as a means to stem the tide of the “negro invasion” (9)(see previous post). “Cobo presided over, and was involved in, the removal of streetcars from Detroit’s streets,” writes the @metrotimes. “There were 10 functioning streetcar lines when Cobo took office in 1950. By 1956 they were all gone.” (10)
“Cobo promoted freeway construction as the way of the future,” continues @metrotimes. “In the end, it was he who personally urged the City Council to sell the city’s recently purchased fleet of modern streetcars to Mexico City. It was a controversial move. A newspaper poll showed that Detroiters, by a margin of 3-to-1, opposed the switch to buses. Some even jeered the sunken freeways Cobo championed, dubbing them ‘Cobo Canals’.”
While it is true that the influence of the automobile manufacturers (no fans of public transit) certainly hastened the system’s decline, equally as impactful was the shift in public and official sentiment towards transit in the era of white flight. For city leaders, pursuing economic growth at all costs, the future lay in better connecting the middle-class, white workers of the automobile-based suburbs with the economic opportunities of the commercial core (11). The “inner-city”—the diverse communities that lived there, the built fabric of neighborhoods in which these communities had flourished, and the infrastructure that had supported them—would need to make way for suburban access.
As discussed in previous posts, this sentiment took hold across the country. Thus, while in some instances the automobile companies were directly involved in the dismantling of streetcar networks in favor of buses (which they manufactured) and greater automobile dependence (12), the conspiratorial actions of National City Lines (NCL) is only a part of the story. While the automobile companies stood to gain, much of the public was in favor of the future these companies were selling.
Somewhat surprisingly, Detroit’s network was never acquired by a predatory outfit such as NCL, but rather was one of the first transit systems under direct municipal ownership and operation, in the form of the Department of Street Railways (DSR). In fact, at its height, the DSR was the largest publicly owned streetcar network in the country (as opposed to the larger, but privately owned systems in LA and New York). In this case it was not the auto companies who ripped out the rails, but the city government.
[ENDNOTES]
1. “The DSR Years.” (2009). Detroit Transit History. https://www.detroittransithistory.info/DSR/TheDSRYears.html (accessed 28 May 2025).
2. Trajkovski, Alex (2017). “A Concise History of Detroit Public Transit.” Curbed Detroit. https://detroit.curbed.com/2017/9/22/16322202/detroit-transit-history (accessed 28 May 2025).
3. Madu, Zito (2021). “Living Through Detroit’s Perpetual Housing Crisis.” The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/161813/detroit-housing-discrimination-brightmoor-racism-redlining (accessed 28 May 2025).
4. Felton, Ryan (2014). “How Detroit Ended Up With the Worst Public Transit.” Detroit Metro Times. https://www.metrotimes.com/news/how-detroit-ended-up-with-the-worst-public-transit-2143889 (accessed 28 May 2025).
5. Archer, Deborah N. (2025). Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Perpetuates Racial Inequality. W.W. Norton.
6. “Detroit’s Streetcars: Past and Present.” (2016). Detroit Historical Society. https://www.detroithistorical.org/learn/online-research/blog/detroits-streetcars-past-and-present (accessed 28 May 2025).
7. Jackman, Michael (2014). “Detroit Mayor Albert Cobo: The Man, His Plan, and the ‘Canals’.” Detroit Metro Times. https://www.metrotimes.com/news/detroit-mayor-albert-cobo-the-man-his-plan-and-canals-2241952# (accessed 28 May 2025).
8. Jackman, Michael (2006). “Back Track.” Detroit Metro Times. https://www.metrotimes.com/news/back-track-2184294 (accessed 28 May 2025).
9. Sugrue, Thomas (1998). The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. University of Princeton Press. Pp 249.
10. Jackman, Michael (2014).
11. Archer, Deborah N. (2025).
12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy