![\"tigers\"](\"http:\/\/challengedetroit.org\/thomasschuelke\/files\/2014\/04\/tigers.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
It is March 30th<\/sup> and that means one very important thing to citizens across the entire state of Michigan\u2014baseball opening day is tomorrow. Love it or hate it, baseball will be invading Detroit for the next 6 months. An avid sports fan, I am in the camp of loving it. My wife and I will undoubtedly be spending a lot of time at Comerica Park this summer.<\/p>\n However, this year will be a bit different for us now that we live in Detroit. On weekdays when the Tigers have a game, I\u2019m mentally preparing to face traffic delays coming home from work and a more limited selection of available street parking as everyone drives to the stadium to see the game. But why is this? My wife and I have a tradition where we try to go to at least one Tiger\u2019s away game every year. So far, we\u2019ve watched the Tigers play at U.S Cellular Field (Chicago), Fenway Park (Boston) and Wrigley Field (Chicago again). For each of these games, we had no traffic problems and no parking problems. We were able to use the subway.<\/p>\n According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal<\/a>, only 20% of the metropolitan Detroit population can reach their jobs within 90 minutes using public transportation. That ranks us as 71st<\/sup> out of the top 100 metro areas nationwide. Being in Detroit, it feels like you cannot go anywhere if you don\u2019t have a car\u2014which is a shame because that really takes some of the advantages of \u201ccity-living\u201d away from its residents. In cities like New York, Washington DC and Boston, over 1\/3 of the households don\u2019t even own a car because public transportation can get them anywhere they need to go. Ironically, that statistic is rising more quickly for Detroit than in any of these cities not because Detroiters don\u2019t need cars but because they can\u2019t afford them. Parking and insurance rates (not to mention rent) have been on the rise and are making owning an automobile in the Motor City cost prohibitive. Public transportation is clearly needed and in a hurry.<\/p>\n Concept drawing for the M-1 rail<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n the <\/span>Detroit News<\/a>, the line will serve an estimated 1.8 million riders annually and is scheduled to start service in 2016<\/span>.<\/span>After years of discussion, the M-1 Rail project<\/a> is finally scheduled to break ground this spring. While it won\u2019t get us immediately to the complexity of a full-fledged subway, it\u2019s a step in the right direction. The streetcar line will run down Woodward connecting the Fisher Building (West Grand Blvd) at the north end down to the Renaissance Center (Larned Street) with 9 stops in between. It will link to the People Mover at 2 of the stops in a manner\u00a0 that starts to make Detroit\u2019s public transportation map look like those of bigger cities that have a loop around the downtown core with several transit lines shooting off of it. According to an article published by<\/p>\n While the new project won\u2019t help me much this year, I look forward to the day when I can hop on the Woodward Express (my personal working title\u2014if you have any good names for it, please post them in the comments below!) and catch a game without the headache of traffic or the wallet-draining parking fees that exist today. Until then, I\u2019ll be joining the rest of the state in driving to the games (unless anyone knows where I can park a bike close by). Go Tigers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is March 30th and that means one very important thing to citizens across the entire state of Michigan\u2014baseball opening day is tomorrow. Love it or hate it, baseball will be invading Detroit for the next 6 months. An avid sports fan, I am in the camp of loving it. My wife and I will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":331,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/331"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/challengedetroit.builtrare.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Public transportation in the D<\/h2>\n
![\"detroit_light_rail_01-550x347\"](\"http:\/\/challengedetroit.org\/thomasschuelke\/files\/2014\/04\/detroit_light_rail_01-550x347-300x189.jpg\")
Enter the M-1 Rail<\/h2>\n