DETROIT – Thursday marks 38 years since the People Mover began literally moving people throughout Downtown Detroit.
The July 31, 1987, opening signified a new chapter in Detroit’s long history of rail transit, which at one point was among the best in the country.
Streetcars and subways
Streetcars got their start in the late 1800s, when they were pulled through Detroit and other American cities by horses. Horse-powered railways allowed people to live further from of work, reshaping cities in the process, according to The Henry Ford.
The problem was that horses were filthy. They created up to 1.3 million pounds of manure every day in New York alone, and forced sanitation departments to remove tens of thousands of dead horses from streets each year…