When the QLine stalls, it’s usually because some idiot parked on the track. Then to get the QLine streetcar going again, it’s a simple matter of getting the idiot to move his car off the track. It rarely takes more than a few minutes. It happened at least once earlier today.
But that wasn’t the case Wednesday afternoon. At least three southbound QLine streetcars were stalled on Woodward Avenue for hours, well into the evening. A personal vehicle crashed into another near the Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard stop, and to make matters worse, that same car continued south on Woodward and crashed into yet another car.
I knew I had hung around the First National Building in downtown Detroit a little too long when I heard the QLine’s horn sound. That was about 5:20 p.m. Wednesday. I walked over to the QLine’s southern terminus, hoping it was the southbound QLine that had just gone by and the driver was about to take a short break before heading north.
But no, it was the northbound QLine, and I had just missed it. Some other guy and I started walking north on Woodward Avenue, then he went into a restaurant to wait for a friend to come pick him up. I continued to the Grand Circus stop, and from there I saw a bunch of flashing lights beyond I-75. I understood then what was holding up the QLine, though I didn’t yet know the full details.
By 6:00 p.m., I was on the Wayne State University campus, and went about what I had planned to do as normal. By about 7:30 p.m., I was ready to go home. I saw a QLine streetcar at the Woodward and Warren southbound lane with passengers in it. But the driver was playing some kind of casino game on her phone. She said I could stay on the train, but it wouldn’t get going again for another hour or two.
The QLine is a streetcar in Detroit that goes up and down Woodward Avenue, route M-1. Not the whole avenue, just three or four miles of it from downtown Detroit to Grand Boulevard (which long ago delineated the city limits). It used to cost $2 to ride, but now it’s subsidized by Michigan taxpayers and is free to ride until 2039.
It can only run on its track, obviously. So if the lane is blocked by another QLine streetcar, or by a personal vehicle or whatever, the streetcar is stuck. That night, I walked further down to the MLK stop, where another QLine streetcar was also stalled.
And I kept going to the Little Caesars Arena stop. That’s where I saw a third stalled QLine streetcar and two crashed cars. The QLine streetcar was not impacted, as far as I could tell. Both of the crashed cars were in the QLine’s lane, but one was facing more or less in the correct direction for the lane and the other one wasn’t. The two crashed cars were about twenty or thirty yards apart. There was a third car involved in the incident, presumably belonging to the first victim, but either I didn’t see it or it had already been cleared away.
According to Fox 2 News, a pedestrian was killed, and two people, including the suspect, were hospitalized. I’m not aware of any other local news reporting on this incident.
Both the Detroit Police Department and the Wayne State University Police Department are investigating the crashes. Little Caesars Arena is near the Wayne State University Mike Ilitch School of Business building, which the Ilitch family got the university to build with a “gift” from the family and a lot of taxpayer money (Steve Neavling was one of the few to report the troubling details of the supposed gift from the Ilitches).
At least this incident happened on a Wednesday night, and not on a night with any big sports or entertainment event. Heaven forbid a fatal accident discourage people from paying $50 per car for parking near Little Caesars Arena, or paying a more reasonable price a little further north and then taking the QLine down to the arena. That’s kind of the main reason for the existence of the QLine.