OUT IN THE WORLD WITHOUT A CAR: Car-free in the Motor City
By Steve Price
At the end of May, Janet Byron and I went to Detroit as a side trip on our visit to Oberlin, Ohio, for our daughter’s college graduation. We took a Greyhound bus from Cleveland to Detroit and spent three days in the Motor City. You can’t be car-free without being fully informed about what you are missing. Remarkably, we saw a lot, even without renting a car.
Steve enjoying Detroit pizza.
Detroit has a free streetcar called the QLINE, which runs on Woodward Street (a major thoroughfare) from downtown to the Detroit Cultural Center and beyond. The streetcar had a stop steps away from our hotel, the Inn on Ferry Street, which was made up of four charming and beautifully restored Victorians. Needless to say, we took the QLINE multiple times every day.
Fittingly, a noisy Grand Prix Formula One race closed off much of Detroit’s downtown while we were there, bringing hordes of boisterous tourists to the city. Walking around the downtown, it seemed like every fourth building was big parking garage.
Janet waits for the Dertroit People Mover, which does a loop around the downtown.
We enjoyed our sightseeing: the Detroit Institute of Arts (Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” frescoes), the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and the Michigan Central rail station (a former symbol of urban decay, now restored as offices and an event space by the Ford Motor Company). We rented bikes from MoGo to ride on the Detroit’s beautiful Riverwalk along the Detroit River, with views of Canada across the river.
We were surprised to see many people on bikes and e-bikes. While we were out on a walk, someone on the street invited us to join a group bike ride called Slow Roll Detroit. (I don’t know how he knew we were the bicycling types.) We met the group before they started their ride but since we weren't able to secure bikes, we bid them good journey. Slow Roll Detroit has 9,000 subscribers for their Thursday night rides and advocates for a safe network of bike routes.
Photo: Slow Roll Detroit
The next day we took a bus from downtown Detroit to nearby Dearborn where the Ford Motor Company is located. We walked from the Dearborn Transit Center to The Henry Ford museum, which was an uninspired walking route — I think we were the only museum attendees who arrived by foot. We strolled around Greenfield Village, a nostalgic turn-of-the-20th-century historic town re-creation with period homes (and Thomas Edison’s lab), all transported there by Henry Ford.
At The Henry Ford museum, we saw loads of historic machinery and generations of cars. One exhibit had a quote I was surprised to find from George Romney, father of Mitt, and president of American Motors in 1955: “Cars 19 feet long, weighing two tons, are used to run a 118-pound housewife three blocks to the drugstore for a two-ounce package of bobby pins and lipstick.” I wish our present CEOs would be so candid about the misuse of their products.
A planter-protected bike lane on one of Detroit’s many highway overpasses.
— With Janet Byron