![]() As Detroit’s rapid transit line, the People Mover occupies maybe 1/32nd of a page in the book of maps. There is Massimo Vignelli’s 1974 NYC transit map, abstracting the transit system from the physical city by losing references to physical landmarks. In a collection called Transit Maps of the World, the London Underground is Medusa-dense, a tangle of schematic designs making sense of lines from all across the city and their transfer points. By contrast, the People Mover serves 2.9 square miles. At an aggregated 117 square miles, there is still room in Detroit after superimposing those metropolitan masses. The City of Detroit in relationship to The People MoverĪt 139 square miles, the relative scale of Detroit can be conjured by mentally placing the geographic boundaries of Boston and San Francisco and the borough of Manhattan within the city limits. But on ordinary weekdays, after 9am, while the People Mover is moving.not so many people are moving. Or, for the commuter, a parking structure. Cadillac, that’s the French explorer-or the car. For the People Mover, this is the Cobo Center (especially once a year for a few frigid January weeks for the Detroit International Auto Show), for hockey fans the Joe Louis Arena, Greektown for gamblers, or Astoria Bakery for the odd ethnic adventurer looking for a long lost pastry. Get consumers in front of where they want to be. Mall developers call this the dumping strategy. ![]() ![]() For suburbanites who were uncertain of the city, the People Mover offered the promise of safety, and commuters continue to drive through the city’s neighborhoods, park in secure garages downtown, and take the train to work at the fortified Renaissance Center without having to touch the ground. My urban legend recorder says this small circle was an investment in the downtown of a city still reeling from urban unrest that had been brewing for decades but surfaced most publicly in July of 1967 as the Detroit rebellion and the Detroit riots. That may have been the goal-it may still be. Namely, that the People Mover is used primarily as a way to get from your car to downtown office buildings, sports arenas, convention halls, or the casino without ever touching a sidewalk in Detroit. Looping Detroit started as a ride with an itinerary involving getting off at each stop, an agenda to create new habits of use, and counter existing patterns of the People Mover. I asked, I suppose, for poetic reverie and kept stumbling into politics, and vice versa. I invited contributing artists and writers to join me and board and descend the People Mover at a given stop with the minimal brief of “anything that would not be in a tourist’s guide to the city.” I ride it a lot-occasionally for utility, more often for solitude, and, in the course of this project, for rumination. Or you can descend at any stop and consider the terrain, each conversation, sighting, or associative memory a portal into worlds (beyond) all within a 1,000-yard radius. You can ride all day-you may even have the train to yourself. For 75 cents, you can buy a token and ride the People Mover, the self-driving monorail 50 feet above downtown Detroit’s ground.
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