Backstory: Can the Motor City walk?

One might argue, of course, that Detroit is a company town - the car was bound to dominate. But it's hard to understand the pull of the car until you see the city in action.

On a late Friday afternoon, a tumbleweed wouldn't look completely out of place on the empty streets of the southwest corner of downtown where the abandoned Tiger Stadium looms. But the parking lot at Nemo's Bar and Grill is packed with Cadillacs, Buicks, and Fords - a sure sign of "city life" here.

"This place is basically an oasis," says Dave Stronski, who tends to the crowd that has to go out of its way to get here. "The people are from all over and drive just to come here."

Even on pro sports game days they come, Mr. Stronski explains. They eat and drink at Nemo's, park their cars in its oversized lot, then turn to this establishment to provide the thing this city has so little of - mass transit. Nemo's keeps four buses to shuttle patrons to the downtown homes of the Lions, the NHL Red Wings, and the Tigers, all of which are over a mile from here.

"There's no mass transit," Stronski says. "I wish the city was more like Chicago or New York, but it's not."

The loyalty people feel to the industry that built the city leaves some conflicted.

"A mass transit system would hurt the auto industry. They're having a hard enough time selling cars as it is," says William Hudson a security guard at GM's Renaissance Center. "I guess I'd kind of like something for downtown, like the El in Chicago, but nothing that would take people out of the city. It would hurt the auto companies." In other words, something that would replace walking downtown would be OK - but nothing that would make it easy to get in or out of the city without a car. That's bad for business. And why waste all that parking?

Of course, Detroit does have a kind of rail system, the People Mover, a 2.9-mile driverless elevated train that loops around downtown. But ridership has always been light. In fact, the number of times people boarded mass transit of any kind in this area (mostly buses) in 2002 was about 54 million. That may sound like a lot, but Chicago logged nearly 600 million trips; Boston about 400 million and the New York City area 3.3 billion.

Those numbers aside, there are tangible signs of change here in the Motor City, indications that "walk" is less a four-letter word than it once was.

On a warm, sunny spring weekday, the streets of the city are crowded by local standards - there are always at least four or five people on the sidewalk. This is progress: Even five years ago, it was easy to stand alone on a city sidewalk at high noon.

A small strip of Woodward Avenue, Detroit's main drag, has seen new office buildings go up. Those buildings have drawn people and things like bookstores, and, yes, even Starbucks - the gauge of an urban pulse. Loft apartments are going into old warehouse space and some young people are moving in. The city's development of a park and skating rink, Campus Martius, has drawn some foot traffic. There are even a few more souls on the chronically under-peopled People Mover.

But there's a long way to go yet. Pedestrians still look over their shoulders suspiciously. And ask a policeman how to walk to the famous Lafayette Coney Island diner and you draw a puzzled look.

Outside the downtown Michigan Opera House, Karl Hubble, a part-time loading dock worker there, smiles: "Look, it's Detroit. Everywhere you go people drive. It's only about 35 minutes to downtown from any nearby suburb. It's easy to walk down here, but they are just starting to do it."

When will walking become more than a novelty and be embraced as an actual means of transportation? "In time," he says. "It'll take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Detroit is Detroit."

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