Traffic on the Detroit People Mover surged in January. The additional riders, though, were not primarily Detroiters. Most were suburbanites using the elevated monorail as a shuttle from outlying parking to the North American International Auto Show.
It’s one of the many paradoxes in U-M art prof Nick Tobier’s new book, Looping Detroit: A People Mover Travelogue. Visitors can “park in a secure parking facility and take the People Mover and get out into the building they are going to,” he explains by phone. “They never really have to touch the streets.” Meanwhile, Detroiters who need mass transit to get to work are “shivering and waiting for buses.”
Fascinated by social life in public places, Tobier has sent students to work alongside vendors at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market and craft giant puppets for FestiFools. The book contains his own closely observed black-and-white photos of the People Mover route with contributions from fifteen Michigan writers and artists. He says he invited them to “ride the small loop as an explorer, mining the environs around each station as a poetic ramble, a psycho-geographic wander, a cultural inquiry that simultaneously ponders the poetics of circulating above the city streets while probing the greater narrative of Detroit’s public transit conundrum.”
Lost in the Renaissance Center after getting off to use a restroom, David Gluckman and Zak Rosen encounter an advocate of “Ren Cen Zen,” who counsels, “each step is a gesture.” Cornelius Harris recalls breaking up with his girlfriend at Cadillac Square, after looking down on the library where they first met. Artist and printmaker Stacey Malasky illustrates the Broadway stop with a drawing crammed with everything from a Wagnerian opera singer to coney dogs.
Malasky says her toddler loved riding the People Mover with her. But, she adds, it’s “a pretty poor excuse for public transportation.”
