My trip to foreign city was reminder Detroit's transit system needs work

Any time I visit a large city, or many a midsize city for that matter, I see yet again how much Detroiters suffer from the lack of good public transit.

The latest example for me came last week when I joined family members on a weeklong holiday in Berlin.

In the German capital, we found trams, subways and buses speeding passengers throughout the city and suburbs. The route map of all these lines resembled the web of some very ambitious spiders.  

Upon arrival in Berlin, we bought seven-day passes to this network for a little over $30 each, and then hopped on and off the trams and subways all week as we made our way around the city. The word “convenient” doesn’t quite capture how easy this was; we rarely waited more than five minutes for a speedy rail connection to wherever we wished to go.

Bicycle commuting, too, is popular in Berlin. The bike lanes are clearly marked and heavily used, especially at rush hour.

Why it works

One reason public transit works so well in Berlin — besides the obvious commitment government has made to building and maintaining the system — is that everyone obeys the rules of the road. Motorists share the road with bicyclists; bikers stop at red lights, and pedestrians don’t jaywalk. This mutual cooperation makes it all run smoothly.

And this, more or less, is how residents and visitors in so many cities experience public transit. Details may differ from place to place, and certainly some transit systems suffer funding problems or other challenges. But in almost any city of any size, residents and visitors expect as a matter of course to ride reliable public transit at an affordable price.

Detroit is the outlier, and not in a good way.

It’s not just in the biggest cities like Berlin, New York and Chicago that enjoy convenient public transportation. Places as varied as Denver, Portland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston and many more in this country and dozens more around the world all offer good public transit networks.

More:Detroit's mobility options changing faster than we think

More:New protected bike lanes on East Jefferson will be test for Detroit

So why doesn’t Detroit? Anyone who has followed the debate on transit here knows the long, tangled story of false starts, missed opportunities, bogus criticisms, city-suburban rivalries and other factors that stymied transit here for decades.

We've had our chances

As recently as 2016, suburban voters in metro Detroit killed the latest effort to secure funding to build out a network of rapid buses crisscrossing this region. The Regional Transit Authority of Southeast Michigan created by state law will try again with another ballot proposal one day but it’s unclear when and what the next proposal will look like.

Rather than get into the details of any such proposal today, let’s just remember how different traveling this region is from the way residents in so many other cities get around. Sad to say, the expectation that reliable public transit will be there when needed is as present elsewhere as it is absent here.

Contact John Gallagher:313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com.Follow him on Twitter@jgallagherfreep. Read more on business and sign up for our business newsletter.