The Ride Is Free

A new series. Same newsletter.

The Signal has always covered the Detroiters building the future. This time we're asking a bigger question: what does Detroit look like in a hundred years if we build it for everyone who'll live here — not just everyone who can pay today?

This series is called Detroit 2126. One city essential per installment. First up: how we move.

The seeds are already planted

On August 4, Wayne County did something this region has never done.

Sixty-seven percent of voters — 230,387 people — approved a countywide transit millage. All 43 communities, including the 17 that had opted out of SMART, are in. Ten years of funding. In Detroit, the yes vote hit 85.8%.

The millage authorizes up to 0.9831 mills — about 98 cents per $1,000 of taxable value, roughly $8 a month on a $100,000 home — through 2035. SMART's plan: eight new routes, five extensions, on-demand Flex service ($2–$8 a ride) where fixed routes don't make sense, phased through 2029. Next door in Oakland County, the 2022 millage produced a 49.5% ridership jump. The model works.

And here's the part people forget: Detroit already runs one of America's few fully automated transit systems. The People Mover has been driverless since 1987 — thirteen stations, a downtown loop, a full circuit in about fifteen minutes. It's been zero-fare since 2024. Water Square station is mid-renovation, and an $800,000 system study is mapping two-way service, better stations, and three expansion corridors reaching Corktown, the Riverfront, and Eastern Market.

The QLINE runs Woodward. DDOT runs the city buses, SMART the suburbs, and the RTA's Transit app puts all of them in one place with real-time arrivals and in-app fares.

The pieces exist. They've just never been a system. On August 4, the region voted to change that.

Free works — and the receipts are in

This is where "free" stops being a fantasy. Two experiments ran it at scale, and the data came back.

Luxembourg made all public transit free nationwide in 2020. In 2025, the national rail operator carried a record 31.4 million passengers. Luxembourg City's tram went from 6 million annual riders to over 31 million by 2024 — and kept growing.

Kansas City went fare-free in 2020 too, the largest U.S. city to try it. A University of Kansas study published in Transport Policy found bus ridership 24% higher than peer cities, 17% of riders new to transit, and 92% saying they could shop for essentials and keep jobs they otherwise couldn't reach. Nearly 40% of existing riders rode more often. Riders without a car made nearly five more trips a week.

Then the honest part: Kansas City reinstated fares in the summer of 2026, after six years, citing the money — about $18 million a year by 2025, growing. Free transit works. Funding it forever is the hard part.

That's the 100-year question, right there. Not "can we afford free transit?" — Kansas City proved the ridership case — but "how do we fund it for a century?" Automation is part of the answer: the driverless loop downtown already runs without operator wages, and every mile of automated guideway pushes the per-ride cost closer to the floor. A fare is a tax on movement. Over a hundred years, the cities that tax movement the least will move the most.

Now the big one: Chicago in two hours

The Wolverine runs Detroit to Chicago three times a day each way — about 238 miles in five to six hours, at up to 110 mph on the Amtrak-owned stretch between Porter, Indiana and Kalamazoo. Michigan owns the 135 miles from Kalamazoo to Dearborn (bought from Norfolk Southern in 2012) and has been upgrading it toward 110. In fiscal 2025, Michigan's three state-supported routes carried a record 713,343 riders, with MDOT putting $20.2 million into operating support.

Under the federal Corridor ID program, Michigan's plan is to double the Wolverine to six daily round trips, with a Detroit–Windsor extension on the table via the freight tunnel. A separate coast-to-coast study wraps in 2028.

None of that is true high-speed rail — 110 mph is "higher-speed," and the honest number matters. But it's the foundation, and 231 of the 304 miles are publicly owned. The 100-year version: electrified, hourly, Detroit–Chicago in about two and a half hours, rolling into Michigan Central as the intermodal hub — regional rail on one level, the local transit network on the other. Ford's multimodal facility study is already underway.

Imagine a century of that. The economic geography of the Midwest rewrites itself around a two-hour Detroit–Chicago link: commutes between the cities, supply chains that don't need a truck for the middle 300 miles, two downtowns functioning as one metro. The cities that built the interstate century won it. The cities that build the rail century win the next one.

We built the prototype

So we modeled it. The academy's 3D training district now runs the Forge Line: an elevated, automated guideway connecting five districts, modeled on the People Mover, with our training bot running microtransit underneath. Students don't just read about the reimagining. They drive it.

Every real system started as a model someone could point at and argue with. Ours is live at detroitautomationacademy.com/#demo — go run the bot and tell us where the spokes should go.

The work ahead

The millage money starts flowing. The People Mover study lands. The corridors get drawn. The Wolverine doubles its frequencies. Somewhere in that process, the region decides whether "transit" means a bigger version of what we have — or something genuinely new.

Our vote: build the thing that moves itself. The city that taught the world to drive can teach it to ride. And in a hundred years, nobody should have to pay for the privilege.

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The Signal is the newsletter of Detroit Automation Academy — where Detroit builds what's next. If you know a young builder who should be in the room, send them our way.