In the early 20th century, people reviled the Detroit United Railway, the streetcar system that one historian called “an outlaw corporation.” Mayoral campaigns focused on street rail over a long period, while in 1913 the city grew to an estimated 600,000 people, with a population of 1 million expected by 1920.
The hub-and-spoke layout of avenues and main streetcar routes resulted in few cross-town connection points but plenty of political turmoil; brutal rush hours clogged Grand Circus Park with streetcars, negatively affecting commuters’ mobility and voters’ attitudes.
Detroit had arrived at an apparently critical state, as the authors of an engineering survey determined. The question of the day concerned whether a subway system might provide relief.
In 1914, the Board of Street Railway Commissioners — John F. Dodge, James Couzens, James Wilkie, and Jay G. Hayden — commissioned a detailed study by consulting engineers Barclay, Parsons & Klapp of New York. The “Report on Detroit Street Railway Traffic and Proposed Subway,” delivered the following year, was ambivalent.
What sort of subway was desired? Some proponents suggested a long, double-tracked run beneath Woodward Avenue from City Hall — then located at the west side of Campus Martius — leading all the way to Manchester Street and Ford Motor Co.’s Highland Park plant might be just the thing, with its own dedicated trains and a number of brand-new stations.
There would be a single-track loop on Fort, Shelby, Jefferson, and lower Woodward. The plan envisioned stations placed less than one-third of a mile apart at first, going north from Grand Circus Park, and even closer on the lower section and loop. The cost of this subway was pegged at $16.3 million, with operating expenses of $2 million per year.
The typical haul on the existing Woodward streetcar line was 2.8 miles per passenger — much shorter than the average of 5.57 miles on New York City’s subway (known as “the electric sewer”). With the surge in population, Detroit’s likely subway patronage was put at 50 million rides per year.
But how about the return on investment? Revenue would come from 5-cent fares, whereas streetcar tickets were 7 for 25 cents. Yet a skeptical note was sounded: The “Mere size of a city does not in itself necessarily justify the high expense of subway construction,” the report said. London’s Underground, for example, was only then “making a return upon the capital invested” after well over a half-century of operation.
The biggest obstacle against such a mass-transit system was the small size of Detroit’s average household: just 5.5 people, well below the national average. “This rather low average density of population and its singularly even distribution (throughout the neighborhoods) is caused by the prevalence of detached family residences, Detroit being peculiarly a city of individual homes,” the report noted.
As a point of comparison, it was estimated that replacing the DUR’s entire 207-mile surface system would cost $26 million — about $10 million more than the subway, which would add 12.34 miles of track. Yes, the report suggested, there could be an increase in property values and ancillary cluster-development along the Woodward line and beyond, but this could be offset by declines in other neighborhoods.
If it didn’t add up, option No. 2 was a short subway loop for streetcars in the congested downtown district. They would enter and exit on Woodward at Grand Circus Park. “While such a subway would have little earning capacity, it would, nevertheless, be of a relatively small cost, probably about $2.5 million.”
Officials and voters killed a variety of rapid-transit schemes about a dozen times starting in 1915. That year was an inflection point for individualized mass transit, thanks to automobiles.
And in the next decade, motor bus routes proliferated on more convenient routes throughout the city, bringing mass transit closer to home, crimping streetcar revenue, and providentially helping to end the talk of a subway system.
