Horizontal Elevator to Nowhere

By Richard Stengel

The vision was as elevated as the track that loops as high as 45 ft. above the city's streets: an inexpensive monorail that would help revive Detroit's demoralized downtown by shuttling people from offices to hotels, restaurants and apartment complexes. But the reality has gone way off track: the 2.9-mile automated rail system known as the Detroit People Mover, originally planned to open this month, is behind schedule, over budget, shoddily built and, critics say, unnecessary. Many Detroiters, whose only other public transportation is a creaky bus system, scorn the People Mover as "a rich folks' roller coaster." Says Ralph Stanley, the Reagan Administration's top mass-transit official: "It could be the nation's least cost-effective transit project in the last 20 years."

The Motor City, where the car is king, has steered away from any large-scale mass transit since the Michigan legislature unsuccessfully proposed a subway in 1905. But in 1982, after Congress overrode Reagan Administration objections, both Detroit and Miami were given a green light to begin work on People Movers. The Detroit project, 80% federally funded, is one of the first U.S. tests for the innovative train, which works something like a horizontal elevator, the cars powered by electromagnetic thrust. Originally, Detroit planners hoped the People Mover would link up with a proposed area-wide light-rail commuter system. Although the rail system never got off the drawing board, the Southeastern Michigan Transportation Authority decided to take the monorail money anyway.

Miami's People Mover also has glitches, but compared with Detroit's, it has been humming: it is just $2.6 million over budget. Detroit's project was fitful from the start. Eager to get rolling after frequent delays, the promoters broke ground in 1983, although only 3.6% of the on-site engineering had been completed. Not surprisingly, the system has been riddled with defects: 16 of the 173 horizontal guideway beams had to be removed and destroyed in 1984 because of faulty construction. Last month the contractor announced that an additional 14 beams will have to be replaced. Initially budgeted at $137.5 million, the People Mover will now cost an estimated $210 million and will not be ready until the spring of 1987.

Even when the monorail does begin to snake its way through twelve stations in downtown Detroit, critics say, the system's dozen cars, each with a capacity of 100 passengers, will never carry enough riders to justify the expense. Official estimates for the number of daily riders (at 40-c- to 50-c- a trip) have dropped from 70,000 to 40,000, while Stanley, who heads the Urban Mass Transit Administration in Washington, foresees no more than 20,000.

The project's supporters, foremost among them Mayor Coleman Young, say that with hotels and apartment buildings springing up at prospective People Mover stops, the system has already encouraged as much as $345 million in private development. They trust that when the construction quandaries are finally resolved, Detroit's monorail will emulate the success of similar systems in Toronto and Vancouver. George Pastor, president of Urban Transportation Development Corp.-USA, the company that is building the People Mover, claims the train will pay its own way within three years of start-up. "These systems are cheaper in capital and operating costs than traditional transit systems," Pastor insists. "When you subtract all the nonsense that occurred throughout the tragic history of this project, that will still be proved." --By Richard Stengel. Reported by William J. Mitchell/Detroit

With reporting by Reported by William J. Mitchell/Detroit