Deadline Detroit photo
Deadline Detroit photo
A little more than a year ago, the Detroit Department of Transportation had no 24-hour bus routes.
With Monday's announcement of the expansion of bus service, the city now has nine.
“Everybody in this city knows that the key to getting people out of poverty is get folks access to good paying jobs. So many times in the city the jobs are not where the folks live, or you can’t get to them,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said during a Monday morning news conference inside the Rosa Parks Transit Center, according to Christine Ferretti of the Detroit News.
Ferretti writes:
The city of Detroit on Monday launched the second phase of a major bus service expansion, including more 24-hour and express routes from city neighborhoods to its core.
The added services — three new express as well as 24-hour routes — are the latest in the last six months. This phase, officials said Monday, will add 650 trips per week to the Detroit Department of Transportation schedule, bringing the total of new trips added since September to 1,300.
The new 24-hour services include the Jefferson, Michigan and Van Dyke/Lafayette routes.
“It’s hard to imagine a city without 24-hour bus service. But not very long ago, that’s where Detroit was,” Duggan said in a posting on Facebook. “We’re just going to keep going until we build the kind of reliable bus system that people of Detroit deserve.”
The bus service is headed in the right direction, but still remains far short of other major cities and major metro areas that have long taken public transportation more serious. -- Allan Lengel
