PBS has a special on tonight about how a superior rail infrastructure can leave cities head and shoulders above their competition, as well as the converse–how a failing rail system will doom a metro area.

The special is called Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City and it compares the thriving high-speed rail system in Spain to the sagging setup in Motown. When the car took off in Detroit, the train died a quick death. Some people want to bring it back to life.

Here’s a preview of the special. Tumbleweeds through downtown Detroit–wow.

Here’s the NY Times review.

[image: NY Times]

There’s a wonderfully written story about the tragic demise of Detroit in a recent Rolling Stone. Detroit native Mark Binelli did the piece, which is a mix of reportage about what did Detroit in, and his own reflections about growing up in the Motown area.

Binelli centers the story around the annual Auto Show–a once regal affair whose clout has sank commensurate to the auto industry’s.

He describes what it was like to contrast the Detroit he knew growing up with the glittering City of Wonder described to him by his elders.

For people my age and younger, growing up in the Detroit area meant growing up with a constant reminder that the best ended a long time ago. We have no other concept of Detroit but as a ravaged shell of its former self. Our parents could mourn what it used to be and tell us stories about the wonderful downtown department stores and the heyday of Motown and muscle cars. But for us, those stories exist as pure fable. It’s like being told about an uncle who died before you were born, what a terrific guy he’d been, if only you’d met, see how handsome he looks in these old pictures….

Binelli takes the so-called People Mover tram to the show.

…I ride the People Mover, an elevated tram that runs through downtown Detroit in a three-mile one-way loop. The city used to have an extensive trolley system, but it was purchased by National City Lines, a front company formed by GM, Firestone, Standard Oil and other corporations with automobile interests, after which the trolley tracks were ripped up and replaced with buses. The People Mover began running in 1987 and seems, in its utter uselessness, as if it might have been built by another secret auto-industry cabal as a way of mocking the very idea of public transportation. The monorail cars are automated and driverless, like trams at the airport or an amusement park; occasionally, walking along a barren downtown block, you glance up and notice a pair of empty cars passing above your head at a haunted crawl. In the People Mover, I ride by the Joe Louis Arena, where I saw my first concert (Springsteen, Tunnel of Love tour), and Greektown, where I was robbed at gunpoint in college, and the Joe Louis Fist, one of my favorite public sculptures in any city: a 24-foot bronze statue of a fist that hangs like a swing on Detroit’s waterfront, pointing directly at Canada.

[image: Detnews.com]