Critical Planning

Since peaking at 1.85 million residents in around 1950, Detroit’s population has declined to less than three-quarters of a million in 2010.1 Detroit has effectively traded population with its suburbs, with the regional population holding steady despite a rapid outflow of peo- ple from Detroit proper (see Figure 1). A trip to Detroit in March 2014 brought UCLA Urban Planning and Policy students face to face with the challenging environment Detroit citizens cope with. While the mostly low-income population that remains in Detroit requires ad- equate public transportation for job access and basic mobility, transit competes with all city services for extremely scarce resources. Furthermore, the city’s mismanagement, coupled with a lack of regional integration, has catalyzed the deterioration of transit provisions. In addition to funding and management problems, Detroit area transit has two disjointed and dysfunctional systems, one for the city (DDOT) and one for the suburbs (SMART). Meaning- fully improving the transit access of city residents will require a true regional transit opera- tor, in turn requiring that Detroit and its suburbs learn to live and work together. Reflecting on our weeklong exploration of city neighborhoods, we evaluate the poor coordination be- tween transit agencies in the Detroit region, and use census data and a city-to-suburb com- muting example to illustrate the barriers transit users face in the current system.