Detroit People Mover reopens with limited service, free rides after 2-year closure

The Detroit People Mover, which had been closed for two years during the pandemic, reopened Friday with limited service — and no fares.

"It's back!" the Detroit Transportation Corp., which owns and operates the small elevated rail system, announced. "With the number of events happening downtown, the People Mover is ready to be enjoyed by Detroiters and visitors."

But how many riders it actually will attract in the Motor City is unclear, and so are details of when all the stops will be added again and what a token to ride will cost after the free-fare period is over.

Over the years, the People Mover has undergone upgrades, changed directions from counterclockwise to clockwise and back again, and it has been praised and pilloried. 

For now, the People Mover will operate from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, and it is closed Sunday.

It will move in a counterclockwise direction.

A face mask is "highly recommended," but not required, to ride, and only six stations of the 13-stop People Mover will be open: Michigan, Huntington Place (Convention Center station), West Riverfront (the former Joe Louis Arena station), Millender Center, Greektown, and Grand Circus Park. 

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For the next 90 days, anyway, there is no charge to get on.

The DTC hopes that will entice people to start riding it again, which could influence how soon some stops and hours return — and whether the price of tokens will eventually go up. 

Before the People Mover closed in early 2020, its ridership had been on the decline, falling to 1.6 million in 2019  the lowest number since 2004, although each year from 2006-17, it had more than 2 million riders. 

An increase in tourism and new business and residential developments and a concentration of professional sports downtown — the Lions, Tigers, Red Wings, and Pistons — could spur more ridership.

"It definitely has value," DTC spokeswoman Ericka Alexander said Friday. "But you have to understand what the value is."

Seniors who live downtown, convention visitors, suburban sports fans going to games, and even schoolchildren on field trips love it, she said. 

Still, she added, several stations need repairs before they can be reopened.

She didn't offer budget or ridership projections, which would be difficult to estimate considering that it has been shut down for about two years and there is still a pandemic in which COVID-19 cases have been rising and falling.

The People Mover — a nearly 3-mile, downtown public transportation loop — was controversial from its start.

Its origins go back to 1966, with the congressional creation of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration to develop new types of transit. Almost a decade later, the downtown People Mover program was created.

In the '80s, a plan emerged to create a mini-train that would connect to a metrowide light rail transit system that could link Detroit to the suburbs. That never happened, but a scaled-down People Mover opened in 1987.

In 2018, before it was shut down, a single Bloomberg headline did both: "The Joys of Detroit’s Ridiculous People Mover." 

"This is not effective public transit," the article's author, Laura Bliss, wrote, calling the system an "artifact of a vanished era of downtown transit optimism," and "a pleasant distraction, an amusement ride through the city."

Bliss noted that the People Mover connects to no other transportation line, moves at a top speed of 56 mph, and is "almost aggressively useless."

It doesn't even connect to the QLINE, a streetcar system that runs up and down Woodard Avenue that opened in 2017.

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Bliss referenced a 2005 Time magazine article that dubbed it a "horizontal elevator to nowhere." 

Time said many Detroiters "scorn the People Mover as 'a rich folks' roller coaster,' " and quoted a Reagan-era mass transit official who, at the time, suggest "it could be the nation's least cost-effective transit project in the last 20 years."

But Bliss also offered the People Mover great compliment, one that the DTC said many, many other visitors have offered as well.

"For tourists and business travelers like me, it’s a delightful and affordable diversion," she wrote before it shut down. "Penny for penny, at $.75 a ride, it was the best investment I made as a visitor earlier this week."

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.