Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Even at peak, Detroit never really had the density to need more than a big streetcar network. Most American cities except NYC/Boston/Chicago/Philly were like this pre-war, it's just that Detroit grew huge geographically so it rose to the top of the pile.
The subway proposal, as far as I can tell, did not come about because Detroit outgrew its streetcar system, as in NYC/Boston/Chicago/Philly, but as a response to the growing problems of auto traffic in the 1920s that fouled up the streetcars. If Detroit ever had capacity problems with streetcars, they must have occurred 20-30 years later than the other cities, after cars had become available as an alternate means of transport - similar to Los Angeles.
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Timing is the reason that Detroit didn't get its subway. Subways were built in the U.S. mostly around 1900 or after 1970. Detroit didn't even have 300,000 residents in 1900, when subways were being built elsewhere, nor was it even in the top 10. NYC, Chicago, and Philadelphia were all over 1M residents when their els/subways were built in the 1890s/1900s, and they were the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, largest cities. Boston was the fifth largest city.